FRAGMENTS / studio FAIRE / ALICE
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.
Students
Jacob François Allaire, Lise Zoé Allenbach, Eden Amdemeskel, Samuel David Jonathan Aufdereggen, Natasza Jessica Bunoan, Sofia Di Giacomo, Inès Lily Gertrude Dommen, Dylan Dufour, Eva Naïma Favre, Maëlis Léonie Forand, Augustin Fréchin, Achille Frund, Luna Gravier, Agathe Marie Anne Henriot, Laura Alissa Karine Jaeger, Mathis Jecker, Petar Micevic, Pauline Laurence Vincent Misson, Clara Morier, Tobie Nicolet, Belina Osmani, Lino Savelli, EstebanVásquez Cárcamo, Anna Caterina Zermatten, Pietro Alberto Omar Genitrini, Farida Ibrahim
Studio Director
Nikhil Calas
Student Assistant
Laura Garcés
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