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.
The studio’s theme focused on publicness in a mostly domestic landscape of housing blocks. The neighborhood where projects were implemented is located above Piazza Riponne in a sloped setting of Lausanne. The propositions from students had to bring an aspect of collectiveness using the existing and vacant structures surveyed during the first days.
Students
Maria Almasio, Dana Bisada, Eliott Bricman, Alexandre Bühlmann, Giona Canevascini, Charlotte Elongama, Talia Fuchs, Samuele Gianini, Maël Gilgien, Nirvana Herren, Raphael Hubbard, Asiya Hussein, Erjon Krasniqi, Flavie Laufer, Constance Littman, Lucia Marchetti, Maylis Messerli, Saga Moser, Michael Parris, Alessia Rettore, Jordan Sandoz, Elisa Staedler, Tajan Suero Santana & Damian Wang.
Studio Director
Nessim Kaufmann
Student Assistant
Lydia Genecand
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