FRAGMENTS / studio ALTANE / 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 Lausanne. 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.
The double studio (TV-ALTANE) is located on Avenue de l'Université, north of Place de la Riponne. The steep slope of all the sites provides an opportunity to work with a fundamental concept in architecture: gravity. Through research into balance, students must learn to compose in this unstable context.
Students
Maram Abeidi, Leslie Andachi Caiza, Clothilde Baron, Nina Dubey, Arthur Favre, Matilde Gianola, Jodie Grunder, Lothaire Hirzel, Radwah Kaichouh, Victor Lang, Alan Luisoni, Gülbenay Özkan, Lucas Pittet, Gabriel Pugnale, Fitia Randriamasy, Louise-Marie Robyr, Rafael Rosa Miranda, Maxime Roulié, Céline Servant, Omar Singer, Anoushka Singh, Ludovic Würzner, Alessia Yenny & Cyril Zara.
Studio Director
Matthieu Friedli
Student Assistant
Anna Compagnon
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