-
Final Critics of Studio Baukunst, EPFL, ETH Lausanne, Prof. Adrien Verschuere
AUTHOR: Sascha Roesler
CONTEXT: Final Review on ELEMENTS OF CLIMATE, with Sascha Roesler and Sauter von Moos Architects, June 03, 2021 / 09:00–18.30
« Buildings may fall ill, a building can become sick and die, sometimes it is cured from its illness by a good physician. A number of times it can recover, until its death at its allotted hour. A few are never ill and suddenly die, others are killed by men for some reason or another. » 1
After studying the relationship between energy and archetypes and how extreme climatic conditions could shape new spatial prototypes last semester, this second semester engages the temperate climate of the Lemanic metropolitan area. And as the first semester was about new constructions, this one engaged existingarchitecture through rather anonymous case studies, striving for an architecture of the second principle that responds to the largely irreversible vestiges of a once ever accelerating production of new buildings with entropic poise.
The first half of the semester was devoted to a twofold study of these case studies. We investigated their anatomy, dissecting the buildings into their components, and, at the same time, we explored their presence ascatalysts of microclimates. The latter is not just described by their interdependency with atmospheric agents as wind, rain, and temperature, but extended to studies of the properties of the ground or the surrounding vegetation. Those studies were translated to drawings that show architecture by its absence.
Combining these studies, we attempted to conceive projects addressing the potential transformation of some obsolete parts of their bodies. In an act of critical interpretation that entailed a heightened attention for the themes of our preceding studies as much as a resolute disregard for discredited ideas as program or style, we gradually moved from analysis to design, from diagnosis to operation. The case studies were considered mere gatherings of material, architecture at hand to be used, to be transformed in a reasonably ephemeral economy of means. Ultimately, we didn’t reinterpret existing architecture but made new projects with existing material.
1. Filarete, Trattato di architettura