FRAGMENTS / studio LEAKAGE / 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 imagination.
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.
STUDIO FOCI: Ecology and biodiversity
This studio questions anthropocentric readings of the city by approaching it as a multispecies habitat. Students observe where life takes hold, attending both to planned ecologies and to moments of leakage—unplanned, emergent growth that reveals the city’s latent potentials. Biodiversity niches are traced in relation to urban form, materiality, and environmental conditions—light, water, shade, humidity, temperature, and porosity—revealing the visible and hidden systems that sustain them. The assumed divide between nature and culture is challenged.
Students
Kiara Abilleira Fernández, Luca Aeschlimann, Amélie Besnard, Massimo Camerin, Miraç Can, Joaquim Cantor Miranda, Daniel Cuche Evans, Léo Fontannaz, Martina Gonzalez Perez, Lily Jeandupeux, Valentina Kosumi, Emma Lachenal, Cindy Ly, Thomas Manso Neves, Chiara McLaughlin, Emile Morand, Sarah Mounier, Nhu Nguyen, Donatella Ordulu, Robin Perrot, Antonino Sestito, Samanta Sinanaj, Clara Suinat, Nora Windholz & Nemir Wissam.
Studio Director
Sara Sherif
Student Assistant
Arthur Douillet
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