The ONA building was not built to foster human life and interaction. As a welding factory, it was meant for machines. Situated on the border between Oerlikon and Seebach, it was part of an industrial zone where a.o. weapons were produced. In recent decades the area was transformed into a primarily residential neighbourhood, and the ONA building was converted into a mixed-use office building.

We will start from the cliché by visiting picture-perfect villages that symbolize the stereotypical, archaic version of Switzerland: no signs of urbanisation, actively preserved and staged as a scenography of the rural. We will follow these dreams, trace them in history and popular culture, try to understand them. We want to strip them of their superficiality and distil the underlying desires.

Der weit verbreiteten Haltung die Stadtkerne zu schützen, wohingegen am Rand vieles erlaubt ist, wollen wir mit unseren Entwürfen entgegenwirken. Wir planen Architekturen an strategisch wichtigen Situationen mit dem Ziel, starke Wirkungen in sich und nach aussen zu schaffen. Wir wollen damit ein Interesse für eine sorgfältige Stadtentwicklung erreichen und den politischen Diskurs fördern.

The city of Antwerp is currently developing the master plan for the left bank of the Scheldt. We take this as an opportunity to engage with the site in discourse with the city administration and specialists. We want to contribute to the development of the masterplan with an analytical design process.

We develop exemplary hybrid structures that preserve our finite resources and research in what way new architectonical spaces and adequate densities can arise. The powerful structures of production halls and storehouses of a former cement plant in Brunnen become part of a future district.

A new awareness of our limited resources and their use are bringing low-carbon materials and the permanent or renewed use of components back to the fore. We want to take the principle of planning circular buildings to extremes, understand / design buildings as temporary structures and make a contribution to energy generation / urban greening / noise reduction.

The design semesters of Professor Vogt circle around the Alpine arc, following the thesis that it can be read as an urban Common Ground. Every semester, the task of verifying this thesis arises by focusing on a metropolitan region and asking about its specific relation to the alpine region.

Architectural space is shaped from the dialogue between the world of facts and the world of ideas and one cannot exist without the presence of the other. The design studio starts from the belief that architecture is the expression of its time and that architects translate, through the medium of space, their own awareness of a specific way of living in a specific geographical context.

Students will be asked to take a position towards existing buildings in an existing context questioning the hidden potential for a possible new life. A strategy will be then formulated and translated into space, defining a new living form for the existing building(s), rooted in the interpretation and awareness of the context.

To follow

Atelier Gisel is seeking applications from twenty-four early career architects to resume professional and creative activities of one of Zurich the most important architectural practices. Applicants should demonstrate an interest in documenting, re-imaging and extending the practice’s seminal architectural oeuvre built between the 1940’s and the 1990’s.

The studio explores the core of nowadays’ social sphere proposed as an idiosyncratic withdrawal. Withdrawal is meant to be an antisocial attitude but increasingly it is only through withdrawal that we can grasp the spirit of this phase of “urbanism”. The core of the “urban” becomes withdrawal. We may claim that the specific withdrawal we deal with is a deep stay in the sphere of infrastructure

Cro-Magnons painting imaginary worlds in Ardeche caves, Elizabeth I displaced 400 years into the future to witness the chaos wrought by her class, bourgeois Parisians cooking their meals with the waste from restaurants, by choice. Scenarios from three films portraying societies removed from the mainstream and hinting at futures less dominated by consumption and fractured social contracts.

This semester, we would like to invite you to explore the environmental and social impact of the Swiss data cloud. How can we study securitized spaces of minimal human presence? Who controls the use of data? Can data centres serve as public assets. How can data centres be designed to contribute better to a just transition and to urban life?

This semester we will work in the village of Ennenda, a place with a long history and a diverse legacy of buildings. While agriculture is very present in the village and its surroundings, factories that are part of supply chains within the Glarus valley, employ almost one thousand people.

In ‘Essay on Architecture’ (1743) Laugier explores architecture’s anthropological origins, beyond the idea of shelter that the primitive hut embodies. We are interested in Laugier’s vision of architecture as a mediator between humans, nature and biodiversity — a vision relevant to today’s challenges.

In a time of environmental collapse, economic fragility and rapidly aging societies, we are becoming more and more vulnerable, yet we live painfully separate and segregated lives from each other. We no longer have the built infrastructure to live together, even though we clearly need one another, as was made painfully evident by the COVID global pandemic.

As part of the trilogy on Ticino, this semester we are asking about the permanent. Natural stone will be revisited as a sustainable, resistant building material in the search for long-lasting urban and architectural forms. We design spaces that can be appropriated by future generations. The house is to be regarded as a dwelling open to all uses.

We will start with the conversion of furniture in our studio: six chairs. In the first weeks, we will work on adapting these chairs to new requirements and opening up possibilities through the use of other materials. We see this as your first contact with the topic of living and adapting. Subsequently, we will deal with a specific type of Zurich housing: the urban villa.

‘to edit’ means to modify, condense, correct or adapt something: data, numbers, texts. Our focus this semester we will be on editing existing structures – specifically, office buildings into residential buildings.