The ALICE Year One (Y1) program at EPFL explores architecture as a collective, process-oriented, and situated practice, grounded in learning-by-doing and collaboration. Rather than solving predefined problems, students engage in architectural gestures rooted in the living world, seeking respectful relationships between humans, materials, and environments. Structured through successive cycles (FRAGMENTS, ROOMS, PLAY), the pedagogy emphasizes resonance between knowledge, place, and practice, aiming to reconfigure the discipline’s values beyond performance and profit. Architecture here becomes a shared process of learning, where designing, building, and inhabiting merge.
MEASURES: 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.
ELEMENTS: Acts of constructive and poetic translation
From the preceding phase, the language of an intersection of materials becomes a proto-element. During this phase, your architectures are negotiated, and affinities discovered between studios and projects. A set of 1:1 details as proto-elements are constructed, with the body’s energy implicit. A story about material, territory, and the body is told. Articulation is material.
Fragments was an exercise protocol-based. Each student had a bucket of water they through on the site. They then had to transcribe that seemingly mundane gesture into drawings and plaster models. Following up that survey, the phase was concluded by interventions on site that modified the initial flow of water of the bucket throw.
Students
Maria Almasio, Dana Nader Seifelnasr Naguib Bisada, Eliott Jean Leo Bricman, Alexandre Bühlmann, Giona Guglielmo Vero Canevascini, Charlotte Philothée Amba Elongama, Maël Gilgien, Nirvana Océane Lidia Herren, Raphael Hubbard, Asiya Hussein, Flavie Grace Laufer, Constance Marie Wen-Juan Littman, Lucia Marchetti, Maylis Messerli, Saga Maria Moser, Michael Pascal Parris, Alessia Rettore, Jordan Sandoz, Elisa June Staedler, Tajan Lucio Suero Santana, Damian Anlong Wang, Samuele Walter Gianini, Erjon Krasniqi, Talia Mara Fuchs
Studio Director
Nessim Kaufmann
Student Assistant
Lydia Genecand
Y1 Team
Nikhil Calas, Laurent Chassot, Augustin Clément, Rosa Climent, Dieter Dietz, Ophélie Dozat, Capucine Fouquin, Matthieu Friedli, Nessim Kaufmann, Romain Masoni, Bastian Marzoli, Manuel Potterat, Yann Salzmann, Annabelle Thüring, Alejandro Varela Lopez