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.

Bungalow Germania – Exhibition Catalogue

Summer 2014: the Kanzlerbungalow has traveled from Bonn to Venice to meet the German Pavilion in the gardens of the Biennale. Each building has become the stage and the context for the other. The Bungalow becomes legible through the Pavilion and vice versa. The “transparent” building meets “solid stone.” The resulting in-between space is filled with new meaning as memory overlaps with actual physical experience. Built in 1964, the Bungalow in Bonn was designed to speak of the new republic through architectural means and thus became a truly political building. The German Pavilion—itself steeped in history—plays a no less important and politically charged role within the “Diplomatic Quarter” of the Biennale. After the German capital moved from Bonn to Berlin in 1999, the Bungalow disappeared as the nation’s living room without a trace. Now, it has taken on new life in its interaction with the German Pavilion in Venice.

In their response to the theme of the Biennale—Fundamentals / Absorbing Modernity: 1914–2014, devised by artistic director Rem Koolhaas—this year’s General Commissioners of the German Pavilion, Alex Lehnerer and Savvas Ciriacidis, continue their inquiry on the speculative reality of architecture by examining the relationship between national identity and its built representation in the last one hundred years. Their architectural installation turns looking back through history into an experiment: creating presence by interlocking materiality, space, and meaning.

Catalogue of the German contribution to the 14th International Architecture Exhibition—la Biennale di Venezia 2014: texts by Savvas Ciriacidis, Uta Hassler, Quinn Latimer, Alex Lehnerer, Irene Meissner, Sandra Oehy, and Philip Ursprung.

Publisher: Hatje Cantz
Graphic Design: Thomas Dahm
128 pages, numerous illustrations
23 x 29 cm, Softcover
ISBN: 978-3-7757-3830-9 (German/Engels)

ETH Zürich

The City as the Critical Project of Architecture

Selected publications

Bungalow Germania – Exhibition Catalogue