The studio Baukunst at EPFL is conceived as an investigation into the archetypical elements of architecture in light of the challenges of our present age. By imbricating the contemporary and the fundamental a framework is set up in which a critical reflection on what architecture might be today can take shape. Research is envisaged as a project and the project is envisaged as research. Establishing a critical viewpoint is therefore regarded as the primary act of building an architectural proposal. Stemming from the overarching approach of Vitruvius’s Ten Books, the studio addresses a different theme each academic year. After Performative Objects in 19/20, Elements of Climate in 20/21 and Umwelt in 21/22, in 22/23 the theme of Firmitas will be dealt with. Firmitas as a core attribute of architecture is challenged by the gradual realization that the planetary crisis we are facing profoundly obfuscates our notion of the (im)permanence of our built environment. The studios are split up in two parts of different character, adressing a specific aspect of the overarching theme each semester.
he first semester is called Deconstructivism. The term opens the possibility of dismantling deadlocked concepts of architecture, allowing the search for a repertoire of possible transformations. As the building industry is pursuing the acceleration of entropy, architecture might have to look at what is already there, abandoning the strange idea that a building is a static structure, aiming to reverse the irreversible. As every act of (un)building, may it be cutting, taking apart, or blowing up, is both the subtraction and addition of material, the studio will demand an intimate knowledge of, and perhaps complicity with, the structure of the examined case studies, fusing analysis and design. Considering them as raw material, any intervention will have to navigate structural requirements, techno-logical frameworks, environmental effects, and civic potentials. Through this non-architectural, as it were deconstructivist perspective, our methods will acquire critical resistance. Only through this resistance our project will be able to assume agency.