PLAY? CONSTELLATION x TECTONICS / studio ALTANE X TERRESTRE VIRAL/ 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.
Acts of responding to place
We re-measure the site, re-reading its affordances. In this way, each student selects a new origin based on your expanded understanding of the land and stories produced in the first semester. Your architecture project will respond to this origin, exploring the notions and findings from the first semester: bodies, senses, territories, detail, program, story. Through listening to others, we produce a constellation of resonant possibilities. Places emanate architectures.
The site chosen for the double studio TV/ALTANE lies at the junction of two distinct areas. To the north lies the existing wooded Battelle Park, and to the south, the plateau is occupied by a former industrial campus that has been converted into a university. The students’ exploratory projects aim to connect these two heterogeneous fabrics and enhance the permeability between these disparate urban spaces. Nine projects fit within this context, each with a given program and site.
From these projects, developed in teams of three students, two collective projects emerged that will be developed for a 1:1 scale model during the final phase of the year.
- The first project, “Nouvelle Canopée”, will pave the way for the extension of the tree-lined park to the south by partially removing the asphalt from the existing parking lot.
- The second project, “Cyprès”, will provide a resting area around a remarkable tree, thereby also protecting it.
Students
Nina Dubey, Arthur Favre, Lothaire Hirzel, Radwah Kaichouh, Victor Lang, Alan Luisoni, Fitia Randriamasy, Louise-Marie Robyr, Rafael Rosa Miranda, Maxime Roulié, Omar Singer, Ludovic Würzner, Lucio Arnaboldi, Tristan Béran, Loïc Blank, Martin Chardon, Jeanne Dufaut, Romane Jones, Simon Lasalmonie, Alessandra Mansfield, Marie Nguyen, Eléonore Oliveira, Sophia Pajer, Federica Rizzoli, Jesko Tiffert, Edoardo Toletti, Franck Widmer.
Studio Director
Flavio Gorgone - Matthieu Friedli
Student Assistant
Anna Compagnon - Raúl Hansra Sartorius
Y1 Team
Nikhil Calas, Laurent Chassot, Augustin Clément, Rosa Climent, Dieter Dietz, Matthieu Friedli, Flavio Gorgone, Nessim Kaufmann, Romain Masoni, Bastian Marzoli, Estefania Mompean Botias, Manuel Potterat, Yann Salzmann, Sara Sherif, Annabelle Thüring