Constructed Ground: Crisis and Critique

Seminar Architecture and the City I / III (056-0001-01)
Organizer: MAS ETH GTA
Lecturers: Dr. André Bideau, Dr. Susanne Schindler, Marie-Anne Lerjen
Time: Fridays, 2.00 - 5.30 pm
 


La Défense business district under construction, 1970 (Archives Defacto/La Défense


Land is a finite resource, as has become abundantly clear in recent years. Climate change, growing socio-economic inequality and political polarization—all related to the question of land—define this moment of crisis. What does this mean for a critical discourse of architecture?

Construct
Land is a construct, the result of the multiple needs and desires projected onto it. In the words of André Corboz, land is a “palimpsest.” Any territory settled by humans is thus implicated in a web of imaginaries—related both to its past and to its future. Or, as Reinhold Martin argues, without land there is no architecture—no building without a site to build on. At the same time, there is no land, or real estate, to be owned or valued, without the instruments of architecture including boundaries, geometries and aesthetics.

Crisis
The seminar is centered on this reciprocity of crisis and critique in the construction of land. In the process, land will also be considered as part of a history of ideas, in which architects have repeatedly mobilized crisis narratives, for instance, in the Modern movement’s utopian projects. If early twentieth-century reformers saw the collectivization of land as a condition for tackling issues of substandard housing and public health in industrialized cities, today architects are resorting to arguments for the commons to address real-estate speculation and the effects of sprawl. Given the process of continuous urbanization, both our notion of the environment and the crisis narrative have shifted.

Critique
We will address these questions through the analysis of primary texts and case studies. But we will also search for alternatives to an object-centered form of architectural criticism as it has been practiced in newspapers and professional media. The questions of land are of interest to us above all in terms of their critical potential for the discourse of architecture and urbanism.
The Furttal, a valley northwest of Zurich, is our prompt to actively explore the question of land through the genre of architectural criticism. What insights might we gain from the increasingly blurred overlap of different land uses? The students’ work is part of a research project to feed into a larger exhibition on view at ZAZ/Zentrum Architektur Zürich in late 2022.