Acts of surveying the land
To measure assumes a distance between two or more things. It also means to establish references: between spaces, sizes, horizons. We measure, with the senses of the body, a territory that emanates from our sites in Geneva. Starting from an origin, a distance is measured and surveyed, and a territory begins to emerge in conversation with the starting point. We produce, through surveying, a set of potentialities. Reading the land is an act of imagining.
The Terrestre Viral studio approaches architecture through the relationships between humans, non-humans, and the environments they co-construct. By shifting our focus from built forms and their uses to the interactions between the beings that constitute them, our intention is to attempt both a repopulation and a decentering of the discipline, questioning systems of production and protection, as well as understanding what underlies them. To do this, we start with the bodies of different beings or species and the relationships, exchanges, and confrontations between them. The goal is to begin from the in-between, from the interactions between beings, so as not to conceive of inert objects but rather to think about composition, assemblage, and the arrangement of materials, bodies, and affects.
In the Measure phase, in collaboration with Studio Infra, we focused on retaining walls, observing the arrangement of stones and everything that interacts with them—plants, water, insects—as well as the way these structures shape urban landscapes, movement, public spaces, and city life. The wall can be measured at different scales, from the porosity of the stone to the landscape infrastructures that contain urban space, revealing at each scale interactions of different qualities with various beings.
Students
Moaad Azani, Romain Boscardin, Rose De Montfalcon De Flaxieu, Lenny Duboi, Anatole Gilbert, Arthur Hablot, Houssainatou Kidimbou-Nkouka, Alix Laurent, Nicolas Lopes, Zoé Martignoni, Maria Monnerat Batllori, Noumbé Ndiaye, Gaspard Paradela, Jessica Pessotto, Chloé Pichaureaux-Hémon, Matteo Poli, Ada Porta, Elisabeth Ridolphi, Riley Rosenstreich, Samanta Sinanaj, Ysée Souvay, Axel Tracol<meta charset="UTF-8">
Studio Director
Capucine Fouquin
Studio Assistant
Emilie Hamel
Y1 Team
Román Alonso Gómez, Nikhil Calas, Laurent Chassot, Rosa Climent, Dieter Dietz, Ophélie Dozat, Capucine Fouquin, Arianna Frascoli, Carla Frick-Cloupet, Matthieu Friedli, Nessim Kaufmann, Bastian Marzoli, Manuel Potterat, Yann Salzmann, Laila Seewang, Annabelle Thüring