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.
We end the semester with a workshop, AFFORDANCES, whereby we search for overlapping themes emerging from 300 individual ROOMS and a precise collective knowledge of the site
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