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Architectural Design V-IX: Building Pleasures II (Puigjaner)
Last Updated: 2026-06-01 11:32:55
Abstract
During the spring semester 2025, the Architecture and Care diploma studio will address domesticity through the lens of ageing. The studio will aim to question the ageist and normative constructs around the body, and imagine how space and architecture can support expanded caring practices for an ageing society.
Objective
RAISING CRITICAL ARCHITECTURAL POSITIONS Formulating clear and precise questions, using abstract ideas to interpret information, considering diverse points of view, reaching well-reasoned conclusions, and testing alternative outcomes. Performing qualitative and quantitative architectural research and translating it into an architectural language. Gathering, assessing, recording, and comparatively evaluating relevant information and performance in order to support conclusions. DESIGNING SOCIAL IMPACT Designing responding to territories of care and their characteristics, including urban context and historical fabric, soil, topography, ecology, climate, economy… Using formal, organisational, social, and environmental principles and informing two- and three-dimensional design. Understanding construction systems and their coherent formalisation. Considering the environmental impact and the reuse of the design. COMMUNICATING ARCHITECTURAL PROJECTS Writing, performing, and speaking effectively about an architectural design, using representational media appropriate for both the profession and for a wider audience. Making clear architectural drawings and constructing props at different scales that illustrate and communicate an architectural research and design technically, experientially, and aesthetically.
Content
During the spring semester 2024, the Architecture and Care design studio will address the spaces where human reproduction takes place. Gendered constructs around reproduction have been and still are central to the ways we structure social realities. Architecture and space have historically contributed to promoting and perpetuating sexist social models around reproductive labour and its associated care practices. Building on gender, queer, and crip studies, this studio will explore the possibilities of non-normative and more egalitarian reproductive practices through spatial design. Looking at the different aspects of reproduction, from reproductive rights to child-rearing, the objective will be to design institutions and spaces that promote equality and access to structures of care beyond the heteronormative nuclear family. Care practices, from breastfeeding to fostering, will underpin a design course that aims to look at reproduction from an intersectional point of view. The projects envision alternative architectures for Zürich, in which reproduction transgresses the gendered domain of heteronormativity, and positions itself as an expanded social practice supported by mutual and transversal forms of care and kinship. The medical, biochemical, and genetic advances led by scientific research during the first half of the twentieth century are now, mediated by a globalised health industry, having an impact on the body of individuals and the production of subjectivity: the modifications of affects, desires, sexualities, and the capacity to produce and reproduce, says Paul B. Preciado. Since its introduction in the 1960s, the contraceptive pill, a hormonal compound designed to dissociate sexuality from reproduction, has been one of the most produced pharmacological products in the world. Technologies to support reproduction outside the uterus have transformed the rhythms and agencies of biological reproduction. In short, in the last half a century, scientific discoveries and new technologies have transformed biological reproductive processes and impacted the social structures of care that support them. Despite these new biological possibilities and shifting ideologies having introduced new social dispositions, oppression and exploitation persist across all stages of reproductive life. Social dynamics based on patriarchal, sexist, heteronormative, and binary principles perpetuate unequal, and even violent, social practices around reproduction, from conception to upbringing. Contemporary society and the spaces it produces and inhabits are still marked by the outdated segregation between productive and reproductive labour – labour linked directly to the production of economic value, and the labour required to sustain the bodies producing it. This binary dichotomy is to a large extent still gendered, but also a product of other forms of discrimination like ableism, racism, homophobia or transphobia. While male labour is traditionally considered productive, performed outside of the home, and waged; female labour is considered reproductive, mostly located in the domestic realm, and devalued as “natural” work motivated by love, and thus not requiring remuneration. Similar unbalances in the burdens of reproductive care are based on other binary divisions such as migrant and non-migrant, wealthy and poor, racialised and white. Architecture, as a social technology, is not neutral, and has historically contributed to the inscription of such discriminatory practices in space and bodies. The design of the house, public institutions, and the urban is complicit in the discrimination against female, homosexual, non-binary, non-monogamous, racialised, and other non-normative reproductive bodies and lives. In Switzerland, official data shows that nowadays the burdens of child-rearing still predominantly fall upon women, with 70 percent expressing concerns that having a child will impact on their careers.
General Information
- Language
- English
- Levels
- BSC
- Frequency
- Semesterly recurring
Examination
- Type
- graded semester performance
Course Components
| Type | Title | Time & Place | Hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| exercise |
Architectural Design V-IX: Building Pleasures II (Puigjaner)
No course 18.3./19.3.2025 (seminar week).
|
|
16 h weekly |