The studio explores stress as a design methodology for landscape and architecture, shifting from risk avoidance to risk acceptance in response to intensifying climate threats. Focusing on lightweight structures, students stress-test designs against landslides, floods, fires, and storms. By pushing materials to their breaking point, they develop resilient, adaptive strategies.

We engage with sandstone, its extraction and processing methods, and its role as a load-bearing material within structural and constructive systems. In the cities of Fribourg and St. Gallen, we develop residential floor plans and explore the architectural qualities and aesthetic potentials that emerge from an examination of material processes and temporal cycles.