The Japan Studio assignment is to design a tearoom as an extension of the cafe on the Hönggerberg campus and to assemble the structure using construction waste. Students will be challenged to reinterpret Japanese wooden architecture, which established a sophisticated circular economy, in the context of contemporary Switzerland, and to create a new architectural philosophy and technology.

In this seminar we will, on the one hand, deal with the central strategies in the context of the climate crisis and get to know them by reading theoretical key texts. On the other hand, we will analyze concrete architectural case studies from Europe and Japan on this basis and thus examine these as well as the theoretical strategies for their potentials.