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 

Athina Afsary, Miroslav Blum, Salomé Boillod, Mejda Bouchiba, Chiara Candolfi, Julien Capcarrère, Daria Chidean, Paul Dardare, Karine Grillon, Luca Helbling, Tatiana Lemos, Luciana Majuva, Alexandre Martins Ferreira, Tawananyasha Masamba, Damien Meystre, Joyce Mikhael, Josias Monnard, Hadrien Oyex, Leyla Ramadan, Marine Ré, Malo Rion, Noëmi Theurillat, Raphaël Troisi, Franciska Von Niederhäusern, Alyssa Wegmann, Yui Wong & Yohan Zabadio. 

Studio Director 

Bastian Marzoli 

Student Assistant 

Agathe Ducos 

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