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.

The Plot Line—Architecture’s Other Ground

“The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: ‘Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!’”
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and The Discourses

This project explores one of the most primitive and enduring urban operations, the demarcation of land. Simultaneously formal and political, the delimitation of plot lines can be understood historically as one of the first acts of urban design. Prior to any physical or architectural manifestation, plot boundaries turn continuous, open land into an agglomeration of shapes (with fronts, backs, sides). These two-dimensional contours on the land extrude out from (and into) the earth’s surface, forming immaterial envelopes (the party wall’s invisible ancestor?). The shape and proportion of these volumes alone begins to suggest a culture’s attitude toward the land, its people, and its resources. In this sense, the environment is already ‘built’ even before the first brick is laid.

This research understands the city as this type of built environment, where neither the “built” nor the “environment” are its crucial features. Rather, the “rub” or friction often lies within the inherently formless and fluctuating contour of the plot boundary. The delineation and interpretation (both architectural and cultural) of these shapes shape the city. New possibilities for both architecture and the city emerge by revisiting the basic concerns of the plot boundary: specifically, how to add/divide/subtract plot lines, what to allow in and what to keep out (easements), how to connect to or detach from that which isn’t located within the boundary, the degree of (mis)alignment with the neighbors, and where to put things (i.e. the front door). Thus, this project seeks to engage and publicize the formal history of the plot (with its implicit political and economic subtexts), not to document the city as it exists, but as a means of conspiring to hatch new plots for the city.