Vaud. Art et architecture | EPFL Graph Search

Que peuvent avoir en commun des chewing-gums et des disques collés au plafond, un homme qui court, un autre qui médite, des murs écrits, une porte percée, un flot de couleurs, une feuille et un loup de béton, des galets gravés, une cascade de fonte… ? Tous ces sujets font partie de la longue liste des travaux réalisés dans et autour des bâtiments de l’Etat de Vaud depuis 1974, année de l’entrée en vigueur du principe d’animation artistique, formalisé par un Règlement en 1979, et plus connu sous l’appellation de « pourcent culturel ». A l'heure où la question du décor dans l’architecture est plus que jamais posée, cet ouvrage entend revisiter, en un long traveling sur l’entier du territoire vaudois, quarante ans de réalisations artistiques dans des lieux aussi divers que des établissements scolaires, pénitentiaires ou administratifs, afin de permettre à chacun de mieux les appréhender. A des degrés divers de connivence avec les architectes, les artistes investissent le bâti, en interprètent les espaces, établissent des dialogues ou occasionnent des collisions, c’est là tout l’intérêt de ces rencontres. Souvent invisibles du fait de leur excessive évidence, parfois mal comprises, ces interventions artistiques sont exposées ici pour la première fois. Une quarantaine d’entre elles fait l’objet d’une présentation fouillée, croisant les regards de l’historienne Nadja Maillard et du photographe Nicolas Delaroche ; un catalogue complet permet de prendre la mesure de leur variété, en termes d’expression et de caractères.

Architecture without Content 4: Necessary Architecture

Kersten Geers, Andrea Zanderigo

The Data Center is the most definitive and yet invisible typology of our contemporary world. It is the densest spot in our digital universe, a physically invisible space virtually visited by many. In a time when the collective spirit of the net itself is more and more in peril, these privately owned devices represent, in many ways, the pinnacle of our shared infrastructure. Therefore, Data Centers are intrinsically collective infrastructures. Unfortunately the buildings themselves remain largely invisible. Subject to technical and environmental requirements, they tend to hide in the fringes of our world; fringes that are increasingly scarce. The Cloud, inhabitant of the data center, struggles with its own invisibility as the place where our valuable content is stored. Both dynamics are problematic but offer an opportunity. As in our cities, what was formerly considered collective is increasingly privatized (one thinks of schools and communal offices). It might be argued that Data Centers are amongst the few leftover opportunities that, because of their intrinsic content, have the potential to acquire collective meaning. This is not the first time we have investigated this potential. Two years ago, in the first studio at Columbia called Architecture without Content we tried to portray the absolute potential of these big boxes because of the evident impact of their sheer mass when projected in the even covered field. In this studio Architecture without Content 4 we return to the center of the city and investigate the potential of these enormous buildings if they would be located on Roosevelt Island; formerly the outskirts of Manhattan, today the very center of New York. Roosevelt Island is strategically positioned and highly wired. It has a latent potential for symbolic representation, as was recently exemplified by the posthumous execution of Kahn’s Roosevelt memorial and the numerous paper projects that preceded that monument. In parallel, it is undergoing a process of reinvention as a new center of excellence, as exemplified by the recently announced plans of Cornell University to open a new hightech campus on the island. Within all this activity, an overall project is lacking. Architecture without Content 4 reconnects to Venturi’s concept of a Difficult Whole. The Difficult Whole is not a group form, nor a mere collection of elements, but a formal strategy that seeks for a cohesive composition of parts through inflection. Each of the parts influences each other, while the parts retain their individuality. Each of the Data Centers on Roosevelt Island aspire to do the same. Their content is an alibi for architectural form whereas their position is integrally part of the overall project for the island. The immutable forms of these big boxes are able to capitalize on their invisible content to create a disposable sanctuary for our contemporary Information Age. The project for Roosevelt Island announces its very decay the day of its completion—an empty civic center.

2013

Conduit, Patio, Waste: Mapping Environmental Relations in Bairro da Malagueira

Bárbara Maçães E Costa

The ongoing ecological crisis is reframing the common binary opposition between architecture and nature and provoking us to ask what kinds of buildings we collectively want to create for the ecosystems that we inhabit. The environment is not a neutral background, a natural scenery, or a container of pre-social resources; and architecture is not a collection of objects floating in a vacuum. Buildings and landscapes constitute each other dialectically. The environmental question in Western architecture had a peak moment during the contextualism debates of the 1950s and 60s, in the UK and Italy. They equated context with ideas such as ecological urbanism and habitat, or preesistenze ambientali and continuita . But by the 1970âs there was a shift from a sort of socio-biological determinism towards a more culturalist approach. Context became synonymous with historical context, and site-specificity was to be achieved less through a dialectical interplay with material reality than through a referential, typo-morphological approach. Gradually, a rift emerged: ecology became a matter of natural fact to be technologically calculated, and context became a matter of cultural identity to be narrated and deconstructed. From this point onwards, and in tandem with the rise of neoliberal commodification and its correlate ideology of postmodernism, Western architecture lost the ability to tackle the environmental question beyond the narrow scope of the individual architectural object. Before this split, the modernist tradition had attempted to address the built environment, and housing projects in particular, as a socio-ecological totality. Backed by large-scale funding initiatives from social-democratic states, human and non-human life could be understood dialectically, with the neighbourhood scale functioning as a mediating unit between the individual and the social. Alvaro Siza's Bairro da Malagueira was one of the last projects of this generation. It emerged from the very particular conditions of the 1974/75 Carnation Revolution and the state-sponsored housing program SAAL, a dual power structure made up of construction technical brigades and neighbourhood committees. During this process, the SAAL-Norte produced a series of projects focused on reinventing the typology of the ilha, and Alvaro Siza wrote a text considering the hypothesis of the proletarian island as basic element of the urban tissue. What was taken from these islands was less their stylistic or typological configuration than the system of environmental relations that they fostered, predicated on a series of threshold spaces and open interiorities. From Bairro da Malagueira, this thesis proposes a method for mapping environmental relations in architecture. It does so by identifying a series of thresholds, namely the conduit, the patio, and the waste, understood as structures that convert space into bounded associations, mediating between inside and outside, foreground and background, architecture and nature. Each threshold acts as a time-space frame with a specific magnitude of approximation, and each internalizes sets of social relations, such as class, gender and race, with corresponding modes of environmental production, namely the hidden backgrounds of territory, domesticity, and wilderness. Bairro da Malagueira hence becomes a template through which this thesis explores a dialectical understanding of architecture as an agent of environmental history.

EPFL2021

An Archive of Projects on Typology in Architecture 2013-2018

Antje Bittorf, Anja Fröhlich, Martin Fröhlich, Sebastian Lippok, Tiago André Pratas Borges

Learning to construct is the objective of the architecture student, who seeks to bring sketches, sophisticated visualizations, material and component choices, and detailed plans and diagrams together in a single grand composition. Plans and Images offers insight into how architects are trained by examining the teaching and research approach of the Laboratory of Elementary Architecture and Studies of Types (EAST), of the EPFL School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC). Going beyond the traditional notion of functionally determined typologies, Laboratory EAST is concerned more broadly with the principles of typology in architecture. Richly illustrated with drawings and plans by Laboratory EAST’s students, the book also includes essays by Antje Bittorf, Tiago P. Borges, Anja Fröhlich, Martin Fröhlich, Rafael Moneo, and Marie Theres Stauffer. An interview with Rafael Moneo, discussing the research topics pursued at Laboratory EAST, and a photo essay by Swiss photographer Joël Tettamanti round out the book