Architectural Design V-IX: Soft permanence (GD A. Solanellas Teres / M. Meister / C. Van Noten)

Literature

What if the most permanent architecture is one that can be easily reused? As buildings face obsolescence through changing needs, we can rethink permanence by adapting and reusing elements with attention to energy, resources, and carbon impact. The logics of extraction are shifting: resources are no longer drawn solely from nature but increasingly from human-made repositories, with our buildings themselves becoming future mines containing reserves of materials. With the notion of Soft Permanence we suggest that permanent architecture is not fixed but open. Buildings do not end as waste when they become obsolete. Their components are waiting to re-enter the material cycle, to find new contexts and new lives. Projects are therefore conceived with the assumption they may one day be moved, altered, or disassembled. They become temporary resting places for materials—moments in a longer chain of transformations. The semester begins with a catalogue of structural components. Prepared in advance, it lets us dive directly into design with what is at hand. The catalogue contains over one hundred components collected from buildings across Switzerland. Some are already dismantled and stored; others still stand but are scheduled for disassembly. Designing in such a way subverts the familiar process. Instead of starting from abstraction, projects grow inductively—from fragment to whole. From the outset we engage with material reality. Elements are not abstract quantities awaiting manufacture but tangible materials to be visited, measured, and reimagined in new constellations. In today’s construction industry of abundance, where almost anything can be fabricated, the catalogue introduces a different yet productive condition: limitation. This semester’s task is to design a collective housing project in the Limmattal, a key territory of Zurich’s future densification. Here we will explore how designing with a catalogue—and the idea of buildings as temporary resting places—can generate new forms of living and challenge norms of dwelling.