ROOMS / studio ALTANE X TERRESTRE VIRAL/ 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.
Rooms: Acts of harnessing and activating fields of potentialities through intervention
We activate the potentialities discovered in Fragments. We design an intervention that responds to, and resonates with, this reading of the territory’s relationships to the body. Your architecture produces a resonant three-way conversation between the origin, the territory, and the body, emanating program. Imagining requires articulation.
IN AN UNCERTAIN WORLD, THE CITIZENS OF THE CITY OF LAUSANNE DECIDE TO BECOME ENERGY SELF-SUFFICIENT. TO DO SO, THEY BUILT A HYDROELECTRIC DAM BETWEEN THE PARC DE L'HÉRMITAGE AND THE PLACE DE LA RIPONNE, TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THE STEEP SLOPE CREATED BY THE TOPOGRAPHY OF THE SITE.
THE FICTION ALLOWS THE STUDENTS TO ALTER THE INITIAL CONDITION OF THE TERRITORY THEY MEASURED, ENABLING THEM TO IMAGINE HOW IT COULD BE RESHAPED IN ORDER TO REMAIN HABITABLE UNDER THIS NEW CONDITION.
Students
Maram Abeidi, Lucio Arnaboldi, Leslie Andachi Caiza, Clothilde Baron, Tristan Béran, Loïc Blank, Maxence Boubée, Martin Chardon, Nina Chevrier, Nina Dubey, Jeanne Dufaut, Aya El Harti, Arthur Favre, Céline Gabioud, Matilde Gianola, Jodie Grunder, Malaika Gysir Diga, Lothaire Hirzel, Romane Jones, Radwah Kaichouh, Victor Lang, Simon Lasalmonie, Matilde Lima Martins, Alan Luisoni, Alessandra Mansfield, Marie Nguyen, Lea Noseda, Eléonore Oliveira, Gülbenay Özkan, Anne-Sophie Pachoud, Sophia Pajer, Rafael Peixoto Malta, Lucas Pittet, Gabriel Pugnale, Fitia Randriamasy, Roxane Revaz, Federica Rizzoli, Louise-Marie Robyr, Rafael Rosa Miranda, Maxime Roulié, Céline Servant, Omar Singer, Anoushka Singh, Jesko Tiffert, Edoardo Toletti, Franck Widmer, Ludovic Würzner, Alessia Yenny, Cyril Zara
Studio Director
Capucine Fouquin - Matthieu Friedli
Student Assistant
Anna Compagnon - Raúl Hansra Sartorius
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