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 ecological continuity within the urban fabric, exploring the tension between densification and biodiversity in Swiss cities. Each student received a 3×3 m cell — a spatial framework to be rearranged, subverted or extended — surrounded by a 1.5 m negotiation border on each side, where adjacencies with neighboring projects were to be resolved. Each proposition translated a main ecological force — light, water, wind, decay, humidity, topography, temperature etc — into an architectural system and programme, conceived so that the output of one project could become the resource of another: a compost room whose heat a neighboring greenhouse might harvest. At the core of the studio lies the questioning of the myth of nature and culture as separate realms — architecture as a niche where life proliferates.
Students
Kiara Abilleira Fernández, Luca Aeschlimann, Amélie Besnard, Massimo Camerin, Miraç Can, Joaquim Cantor Miranda, Léo Fontannaz, Martina Gonzalez Perez, Valentina Kosumi, Emma Lachenal, 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