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

Selected publications

Idyll & Ideology I-IV, Reader

Down in Mississippi, reader seminar week HS 2016

Idyll and Ideology Reader Series I-IV

In: Experimental Preservation

In: Fresh Meat Journal (Issue IV)

Project as Argument, interview, in: trans 29

Zunfthaus Voltaire, selected publications

Studio Portrait, in: Archithese 2.2016 — Bildungslandschaften

“La Potenza e’nulla senza controllo”, in: Arch+, Legislating Architecture

“Wie eine Erscheinung”, in: Germania, Venezia by Stephan Trüby and Verena Hartbaum

“Regelmässig”, in: “Stadt gibt es nicht!”

Reader Seminar Week, Fall 2015: Footnotes from Central Java

The Back, 180°– 35 buildings turned around 180 degrees in Zürich

in: “The Edge of the Experiment”

in: ERA 21, Curating Architecture, 01/2015

in: Log 32

Vergegenwärtigung – Erinnerung, Inszenierung, Spekulation

Bungalow Germania – Exhibition Catalogue

ARCH+ 217: Get Real! Die Wirklichkeit der Architektur / Architectural Realities

in: Süddeutsche Zeitung Feuilleton

in: Detail 6/2014

in: Bauwelt 21.14

in: “Fundamentals”, Catalogue 14th International Architecture Biennale

in: IABR 2014 – Catalogue, International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, 2014

Grand Urban Rules

The Western Town

The Myth of the Condominium

Singapore Tropicana Booklet

Publication

in: IABR 2014 – Catalogue, International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, 2014

Precision Within Indifference

Parts of the Western Town project is featured in the section “Strategies for the Urban Landscape” within the official Biennale catalogue of the IABR 2014.

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