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.
Students
Dune Bachelard, Sera Benzaken, Luna Berno, Romain Cerise, Zaïra Chitou, Anthony Coppa, Lucan Curtis, Axelle Evéquoz, David Ferreira, Ivan Giorgis, Ana Jutzi, Maven Katchamakov, Leonardo Kleysteuber, Lily Mancheron, Thomas Nguyen, Lexan Pahud, Enzo Rossi, Esther Schneider, Mathias Schütz, Naomi Thévenaz, Kira Tijs, Claire Vianin
Studio Director
Annabelle Thüring
Student Assistant
Joseph Mazière
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