Modulverantwortung: Céline Bessire, Steffen Hägele, Tina Küng, Matthias Winter
Lehrteam: Céline Bessire, Steffen Hägele, Tina Küng, Matthias Winter
Assistant: João Moreira

AFTER ALIFE AHEAD¹

Case Studies for the 21^st Century

«I’m talking about drawing a line in the sand, Dude, across this line YOU DO NOT…»²

In theory, building law establishes predictability and protection of ownership. In reality, parcellation produces relentless leftover areas at the fringes. As the realization of buildings and their surroundings is delegated to individual stakeholders with isolated interests, the unbuilt is degraded into buffer zones. Swiss suburbia with its frantic succession of heterogenous programs constantly caricatures the main aim of zoning: to generate homogenous, equal conditions within a zone. But due to fragmentation the sudden clash of contradicting neighbors is the rule: Zoning has put an order into everything, but it created a staccato of anything.

This semester we are trying to find another perspective. Shifting the focus to the very periphery of the plot where different scales, programs, properties and interests collide, forces us to take a stance from multiple grounds. We look beyond singular interests and the isolated object as the uncanny consequence of zoning, property and real estate.

The design studio inverts the paradigm of the architectural project from the singular work to the situated network, from the monolithic object to the porous in-between, from distinction to association, from surface to ground, from real estate to different states of being, from built density to occurring intensities, from moving matter to accumulating meaning, from tabula rasa to the possible beginning of something that was already there. Projects will be choreographed as unfinished, hence transformed in several iterations. They will be developed by means of scientific images based on physical models and speculative detail drawings generating a spectrum of architectural alternatives.
The location is Emmenbrücke, an agglomeration that is emblematic of all Switzerland. Hyper-Swiss in its contradictions, Lucerne’s outpost is the total Helvetian average.

¹ borrowed from Pierre Huyghe’s eponymous installation in Münster, 2017
² Quote from The Big Lebowsky by the Coen Brothers, 1998