"Italian may be "such children" but their tar-babies are not physical pain or coldness; they want an absence of history, they want to start fresh. When they designed those big palaces in Rome they must have known all along about hope and death, but they were so graceful they made it look easy."—Babitz, Eve. Slow Days, Fast Company. Rain. 1977.

This studio invites students to question the assumption that every architectural project must be entirely unique. Rather than designing a single building, students will create a fully automated system capable of generating countless variations of high-quality, inspiring designs constructed using timber and bio-materials.

This studio will challenge students to develop not just one design but a fully automated system that can generate endless designs for high-quality, inspiring, and sustainable timber housing. Students will work in small groups, each representing a notional “housing factory” that is asked to produce thousands of new homes for Zurich within the next 10 years.

The post-industrial site of Ex-Chimica in Arenella stands as a contemporary ruin within the greater cityscape of Palermo. We are invited by Studio Rizoma to record the current state of the site from the point of view of actors on site and imagine new perspectives for this unique location between the Tyrrhenian sea and the Monte Pellegrino.

This semester we will continue questioning Museums as institutions, buildings and practices. Our focus will shift to Basel, a city with colonial entanglements and a rich museum history, to work on the Antikenmuseum und Sammlung Ludwig. We will deepen our research on the Museum’s ecology, imagine new programs and reshape the role of the institution through architectural transformation projects.

We will question Museums as institutions, buildings and practices. Through the 19th and 20th centuries, Museums have been active agents of colonization and dispossession. The studio will work within the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Zurich and the Rietberg Museum. The program will reshape the role of the two Institutions in their context.

Athens Derelict Plug-In proposes an investigation and a set of designs taking place in Athens. Projected at the many layers of the city, the design process is addressed to a palimpsest of different phases of the urban landscape. After many decades of decline of the downtown, an idiosyncratic functional void in the midst of the built city center is created.

PATHFINDER 8 is dedicated to the timeless city of ATHENS: its intricate history, morphology, mythology… all canonical spatial parameters suggested by Lefebvre: political, sociological, anthropological, economical, temporal. Our interest will focus both on the banal and the sublime, on habits and exceptions, individual rites and social encounters.

In "Atom Heart River Studio" students will look for an innovative topological approach within the existing boundaries of the Aare River by the Paul Scherrer Institute and develop a living and resilient landscape structure to strengthen the added value for nature and recreation both on Campus and in the region.

In the immersive studio we will design in virtual space and assess the current project status regularly from a first-person perspective. We will work with the CAD software Rhinoceros and create our designs directly in 3D. Consistent work on the model ensures that the immersive experience of the project using virtual reality glasses is possible at any time and without additional effort.

On the basis of a currently relevant building task - the conversion and extension of multi-storey office buildings into residential buildings - we are testing whether and how a high ecological standard can be achieved in urban buildings. We are interested in the interplay between the existing building and the new part in terms of design, use, construction and also ecological conception.

We are continuing to explore the theme of cohabitation: the interplay of human and nonhuman systems in our built environment. We are focusing on a given ecosystem, as the context for our architectural proposals. Further, we are expanding our toolbox: storytelling and film continue to play an overarching role, but we are opening up the studio to other media and forms of architectural exploration.

Is the Bergell a geographically and economically isolated "chamber" in the border area? A remote place of poetry, but of standstill and resignation, threatened by nature? In our exploratory notes we are interested in the relationship between the landscape and the architecture and their history of ideas.

PATHFINDER 6 is dedicated to the timeless city of BERLIN: its intricate history, morphology, mythology… all canonical spatial parameters suggested by Lefebvre: political, sociological, anthropological, economical, temporal. Our interest will focus both on the banal and the sublime, on habits and exceptions, individual rites and social encounters.

Given the recent events which saw the town of Blatten in the Lötschental valley destroyed by a landslide, the studio aims to enquire on the discussions regarding its re-birth. Students will question the immediate response to rebuilding. If so, Why? How and where? Faced with the topics of climate threat and heritage, students will develop concrete scenarios for the reconstruction of Blatten.

The semester will focus on space as the language of architecture. Real-life constraints, requirements and disciplines will found the basis for the research in the form of fast-pace design exercise

The semester proposes to explore the possibilities of existing structures while critically assessing the conservation of their function, the value of their features and their spatial qualities.

The search for a lifestyle centered on comfort, i.e. free from any form of constraint, fatigue or effort, has become an absolute ideal.Comfort no longer serves only to satisfy our real needs, but is the core of an economic, social and psychological logic in which our sense of well-being is based on the accumulation of practical objects and the systematic use of technology.

We aim to seize economic requirements to transform constraints into levers, producers of qualities. These may well be tangible or intangible, prosaic or poetic, constant or unstable, general or occasional... As long as they are initiated by the economy and located far from any rationality. Creating generosity, “excesses” that make the strength and uniqueness of a place.

AIRA fish asks itself: "What is water"? We can answer this question in its place. We can describe what it feels like to stand in a thunderstorm or go swimming. But can we just as easily answer the question: "What is air"?