ETH Zürich

Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Design
Prof. Dr. Alexander Lehnerer
Department of Architecture
HIL G 74
Stefano-Franscini-Platz 5
8093 Zurich, Switzerland

The City as the Critical Project of Architecture

Ever since architecture discovered the city as its domain, there has been a critical and fruitful debate regarding how these two relate to one another. One is clearly always part of the other, is comprised by the other, sometimes contained in the other. At least the city and architecture always condition one another. The city is the one big project of society and therefore naturally challenges architecture as a cultural project. The productive and intellectual impetus of the inconclusive negotiation between the two lies exactly in the confrontation of the individual with the collective, text with context, the political with the planned, and the autonomous with the cultural. These dialectical moments of inquiry outline what the discipline of architecture has described as a third typology, an architectural project that operates between two seemingly contradictory states creating friction that leads to alternative and subversive outcomes.

This search for a third typology has led us to investigate collective form and its physicality as a result of historical and contemporary processes, as well as projective/speculative conception—at a scale larger than a building and smaller than a city. The methodological analysis of collective form includes comparative observations, critical commentary, and the search for strategic tools that can be employed to simultaneously shape and understand our built environment in order to produce specific public qualities as cumulative effects. The results are thematic formats that can be read as critical discursive urban projects, both as research and pedagogy, but never obliged to only one single scale.

In this third typology, between the big and the small, theory and project, sign and object, the speculative reality of architecture develops its truly striking potential.

The individual research projects are conducted within three disciplinary modes of inquiry: the history of architecture, the mediums in which architecture communicates, and architecture’s disciplinary versus cultural concerns. Within this research framework, the chair searches for examples, narratives, rationales, and manifestos of how architecture is both a product of as well as an influential force behind the form and culture of the world’s infinite anthropogenic fabric.

Chair of Architecture and Urban Design
Asst. Prof. Dr. Alex Lehnerer

Master thesis

For doing your Master Thesis with us, please submit your application directly at our office, HIL G74.

Furkapass

Edvardas Bukota

Schauspielhaus Pfauen – vormals Schauspielhaus Pfauen –

Isabel Lehn-Blazejczak

Genossenschaft Wider Willen

Nicolas Harter Tiziana Fischer

Dorf

Anja Schelling Yvo Corpataux

Ein Monument Für Zürich

Djuna Stöckli

Zürich & Otelfingen

Lisa Maillard Salome Rohner

Pairi Daeza of Otelfingen

Yi Song

Urner Boden

Mikael Blomfelt Sandro Straube

The Twelve Crowns

Anna Moroni

Die Krise der 9000

Tino Glimmann Jan Gollob

Konstruierte Natur

Maria Theis

Boundaries of Niederdorf

Langstrasse – Learning from Kurzstrasse

Die Grossbaustelle von Babylon

Maurus Leuthold

Post-Mortem – The End of the Road

Elena Lurati

Die Legende der tiefstgelegenen SAC Hütte

Lukas Herzog Runa Barbagelata

The Fallen Monuments of Egerkingen

Roxanne De Raeymaecker

Die Schönheit des Katasterplans

Jan Engelke Lukas Fink

Rosengartenstrasse: Preserving the Void

The Horseman and the Six Towers

Donia Jornod

Sportklub Josef

Lucas Bucher

Die Eroberung des Körpers

Anna Gebhardt

Urbanes Interieur – Zentrumsentwicklung Zürich-Affoltern

Klaus Platzgummer

Master thesis

Sportklub Josef

Der Sportclub Josef wurde 2015 vom Bauamt der Stadt Zürich in Auftrag gegeben. Der sich auf öffentlichem Grund befindliche Komplex entstand aus einer Initiative verschiedener Stadtzürcher Sportvereine, welche sich mit der Nachfolgenutzung der ausrangierten Kehrichtverbrennungsanlage (KVA) Josefstrasse auseinandersetzten und in Kollaboration einen kollektiven, öffentlichen Sportclub visionierten.

Anerkennung 2016 Arc Award.

Project by: Lucas Bucher