ROOMS / studio FAIRE / 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.
FAIRE:
ROOMS develops site-specific interventions using what is already present, informed by a collective material archive. Through acts of addition or subtraction, projects reconnect to the buried Louve and reveal hidden relationships between water, territory, and body. Architecture is approached as a medium to transform these conditions into spatial and programmatic devices.
Students
Jacob Allaire, Lise Allenbach, Eden Amdemeskel, Samuel Aufdereggen, Natasza Bunoan, Sofia Di Giacomo, Inès Dommen, Dylan Dufour, Eva Favre, Maëlis Forand, Augustin Fréchin, Achille Frund, Pietro Genitrini, Lucas Gentile, Luna Gravier, Agathe Henriot, Farida Ibrahim, Laura Jaeger, Mathis Jecker, Petar Micevic, Pauline Misson, Clara Morier, Tobie Nicolet, Belina Osmani, Lino Savelli, Esteban Vasquez & Anna Zermatten.
Studio Director
Nikhil Calas
Student Assistant
Laura Garcés
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, AnnabelleThüring, Alejandro Varela Lopez