FRAGMENTS / studio SLANT / 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. 

Following the precise survey of a bucket of water being thrown into several typical slanty situations in Lausanne’s Riant-Mont hilly district, the students designed and built a series of devices intended to interact with the water flow.   

Students 

Studio Director 

Bastian Marzoli 

Student Assistant 

Agathe Ducos 

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