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Architectural Design V - IX: Amalgam (C. Schneider / M. Türtscher)
Last Updated: 2026-06-01 11:30:29
Abstract
In questioning contemporary architectural preconceptions, we immerse ourselves in spatial, formal, and social conditions. By collecting, arranging, and isolating observations, we distill them into projections of forms of living for Zürich’s Kreis 3, a site that, under market pressures and displacement, has become insular and disconnected.
Objective
Our objective is to generate knowledge through active engagement in the development of an adaptive and inclusive design methodology – one that incorporates diverse voices and perspectives, and that builds upon existing contexts together with their physical and social traces and insights. This approach seeks to anticipate and accommodate future change, whilst simultaneously recognising the potential and value inherent in the unfinished.
Content
In an attempt to question and reflect on contemporary architectural preconceptions, we fully immerse ourselves in the context – its spatial, formal, and social conditions. Within this process, we collect, arrange, and isolate our observations, distilling this gathered data into projections of forms of living for a site in Zürich’s Kreis 3, that, due to ever-growing market pressures and displacement, has become insular and disconnected. The studio environment consists of a constellation of project-specific media, with a model and two plan drawings of the same scale (1:33) forming the methodological focal point. Serving both as a record of the survey and as a projection of the context, the continuous development of these media reveals the site’s possible futures. We draw and build, adapt, and extend throughout the semester, allowing for traces of certainty and uncertainty to settle upon them. Never finished and always in process, we discuss plan and Gestalt, and how geometry, space, material, and construction resonate with life. While searching for a compositional framework, we deliberately aim to foster an environment for improvisation – an inclusive space for speculation, mistakes, the unexpected, and subjectivity, allowing all these factors to resonate methodologically, formally, and socially. Accepting the site’s high potential for densification and conscious of the need for affordable housing, we aim to question the dominant profit-driven market mechanisms at play. Countering these exploitative forces with optimism and hope, we explore socially responsible and sustainable scenarios for the future of the late 19th- to early 20th-century urban fabric. The site calls for interventions of varying intensity: from precise adjustments within the existing structure to more autonomous and independent extensions, both horizontal and vertical. We encourage practice at very different scales and in shifting constellations. Beginning with an individual point of departure, where initial strategies can emerge free from interpersonal friction, we then move to foster discussion and resonance through external impulses – whether in the intimacy of a two-person core group or within the wider field of larger, more peripheral constellations.
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: Amalgam (C. Schneider / M. Türtscher)
Permission from lecturers required for all students.
No course on 21/22.10.2025 (seminar week).
|
|
16 h weekly |