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.

Stüssistrasse 19-31

HS 2016 Haushalt

The Mathematics of the Ideal Genossenschaft

Buildings fall prey to predicaments when architects, in attempting to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles and to conceal all that must be done in order to do so, resort to the use of strange and exceptional forms. The process of unearthing and introducing architectural predicaments can expose and ultimately lead to the revision of norms, assumptions and standards that usually remain undetected in architecture. —Scott Cohen

Any given building at least points to a set of rules or ideals to which it aspires. While the collective housing project at Stüssistrasse 19-31 is not emphatic about anything, it at least seems to say: “I am symmetrical,” “I am rational,” “I am efficient,” “I am straightforward,” “I am Heimat,” “I am democratic,” and so on. Yet, as one begins to follow up on these assurances, the building’s announced principles turn into a list of contradictions. One finds imbalance, redundancy, inefficiency and inequality.

This project takes prima facie promises of Stüssistrasse seriously, proposing a chain of minor interventions that, collectively, attempt to iron out the inconsistencies and allow the building to deliver on its promises.

Project by: Flurina Leuchter Claudia Stebler