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NOTES FROM ARCHITECTURE

In the last year of architecture studies at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, students are asked to undertake a research called énoncé théorique. A task astonishingly open in terms of what it can contain and about the form it should take.
This paves the way to the questioning of the role research has, or could have, in the architectural discipline and ultimately brings writing as one amongst other tools for the project.
Of course we stand here in a difficult position for we lie on the threshold between education and practice. And for a writing probably never really exists on its own right—or never exists without a practice so to say—the following texts are necessarily making use of a certain degree of abstraction.
Indeed by suggesting hypothetical takes on an architect writing, this series aims to define a shared knowledge as cultural common ground.
Hence, rather than seeing the text as a crutch for ones own argument, it is understood as a specific tool amongst others, with its rules and goals, eventually allowing research to be undertaken with all the more conviction, passion and precision.

OPEN HAND, OPEN CASTLE

The book presents a double portrait: on one side we have Manfredo Tafuri offering us the critical tools to approach contemporaneity, on the other we take fragments of Le Corbusier to witness their resolution into the project of architecture. Open Hand Open Castle compiles a collection of notes making an argument on ideology and form, with the aim to find a new link between the chose humaine, the social stance and the culture of architecture.

Download the book Open Hand, Open Castle (PDF).

BEFORE THE SWISS BOX

Before the Swiss Box (notes from architecture nº2) engages with a specific period in the work of Herzog & de Meuron, in which from 1984 to 1987 the firm built four projects different in scales and programs with the very same attitude towards the city.

During the years following the Swiss renewal of the 1980’s, Swiss German architecture gradually fell into the exaltation of its own apartness; a condition which led its production to establish itself as an international benchmark known as the ‘Swiss box’. Rather than blending this entire scene in a minimalist parti pris that made the country so successful internationally, Before the Swiss Box nuances a piece of its origins, in which the early work of Herzog & de Meuron offers a serie of projects different in scales and programs having the same attitude towards the city : by displaying layers of diffusion and dissimulation, the building’s initial harshness softens and brings the context in as part of positive collisions.

Download the book Before the Swiss Box (PDF).

ADOLF LOOS

Adolf Loos, architectes des pauvres (notes from architecture nº3) examines how the question of housing became Loos’ primary focus upon his appointment as Chief Architect of the Vienna municipal housing office in 1921, shaping his work within the office, his private school, and his architectural practice until the final years of his life.

The book explores how Loos' spatial strategies for villas inform his collective housing projects. In countryside housing, it presents a raumplan defined by a sequence of autonomous rooms, often enclosed, which, when opened, fluidly shape the plan they form, laying the foundation for a productive domesticity. When transposed into the dense complexities of Vienna’s urban fabric, this raumplan becomes the test of a rez-de-chaussée continu, considering the city as a building and serving as a fundamental mechanism that structures not only the building itself but the relationships among residents as well, ultimately offering a new condition of urban domesticity.

Download the book Adolf Loos (PDF).