FRAGMENTS / studio FRICCIONES / 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.
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.
The Measures exercise sought to foster the relationship between body and territory, turning the act of taking measurements into a performance that also reconfigured the spatiality of the site being measured. The team measured both the visible and the invisible, in an effort to represent what cannot be seen from the surface. In this case, we worked with the Louve River, which flows underground. Later, the elements designed in the second stage, Fragments, emerged from the intention of making the underground Louve River visible. In this way, these elements reveal the spatiality of the tunnel and highlight the urban devices that interact with water—such as fountains, drains, and pipes, among others.
Students
Inès Bellon, Dyna Bencherchali, Lisa Bouveret, Lilian Brodier, Diego Chappuis, Clara Da Costa, Lana De Jonghe, Agnès Delacoste, Ivan Dmitryachev, Eva Estenne, Timothée Féraud, Martyna Klemba, Lucie Moret, Paul Müller, Romain Page, Orlane Portier, Beatriz Ramos Régnier, Lyn Rosenthal, Zoé Sabatier, Lucia Tierno, Natasha Varone, Elie Villard & Mathias Vuillod.
Studio Director
Alejandro Varela
Student Assistant
Noemie Guillouzic
Y1 Team
Nikhil Calas, Laurent Chassot, Augustin Clément, Rosa Climent, Dieter Dietz, Capucine Fouquin, Matthieu Friedli, Nessim Kaufmann, Romain Masoni, Bastian Marzoli, Manuel Potterat, Yann Salzmann, Sara Sherif, Annabelle Thüring, Alejandro Varela Lopez