Stromboli is one of the eight Aeolian Islands. Together they form a volcanic archipelago in the Tyrrhenian Sea that arcs across the Mediterranean from Mount Etna over Lipari to Mount Vesuvius. Located off the north coast of Sicily, they are named after Aeolus, the ruler of the winds in Greek...
Read moreThe Fil de Cassons is a mountain range 2700 metres above sea level in Grisons, Switzerland.
In the Romanic language, fil means ridge; i.e. a mountain range without an obvious peak. It forms a two and half kilometrelong northern end of the famous Flimserstein, a massive wall of rock that is a...
We are dealing with fire in a very specific spot: the island of Stromboli, Europe’s last permanently active volcano. Here, we are going to relate to fire in three ways.
First, as a physical presence, as a phenomenon that can be intellectually analysed or sensually perceived. Through...
The Valley of the Engadin begins at the Maloja mountain pass with a chain of lakes running southwest to northeast: « Lej da Segl », « Lej da Silvaplauna « , and « Lej da San Murezzan » . Maloja is a watershed dividing the river « Inn » flowing via the Danube to the Black Sea and the «...
Read moreOur mission is, of course, to teach people to design: to imagine in physical terms a new reality and, further, to be able to make it possible, to build it.
My interest is more methodological - abstract, instrumental - than stylistic and is situated between awareness of the student’s freedom of...
The desert – always moving, never static; like an ocean of sand.
TOMMASO GIOVANNOLI
An intervention without scale confronts the infinity...
The last semester we were involved in a project that tried to connect literature – written knowledge – with architecture. Of course, knowledge has been transmitted until very recently or until now by books, by letters, by printed forms invented in the Renaissance. So, the fact that books have...
Read moreThe relationship between cinema & architecture is mentioned in many occasions and it's partially true. In fact, the architecture in the cinema appears as a background of the scene, as a background of the action. As, happens with photography, the cinema is giving us a specific point of view...
Read moreOur Giacometti project deals with a very important question that is the meaning of the word context. What is a context? Which is the context?
Of course the context is connected with the physical facts, with the geography, the topography, with the climate, the snow, the temperature and also...
In architecture, designing and constructing mean implementing a way of thinking with a view to action in an active relation with the changing conditions of the contemporary world. From our position in academia, in terms of our pedagogical practice (the place where Architectural Papers are produced),...
Read morePAINTING WITH AIR
At an artistic level, the picture could be painted with the remains of the sky;
making the enclosure ready to receive and...
DANGER & DEBILITY
Fire certainly can be dangerous and out of control, destructive and aggressive.
In these conditions, architecture can...
Palafitic
Gino de Giorgi: On wet or marshy land, architecture is always inserted with care, with the greatest precaution. These sites...
We try to teach how to design, how to produce, how to think and make buildings happen. For me, this is closely connected to the dialectic between concept (abstract conditions) and matter (physical conditions). This kind of synthetic duality is the starting point of our profession, in which an idea...
Read moreIsabelle Ramseier
The project derives from the typology of the ruins. A ruin generally keep contact to the earth. The more distant part as the roof...
The Gulf’s architectural forms have, to some extent, been limited by two important factors: climate and the availability of building materials. The...
Read moreUntil the nineteenth century the Winkelwiese, originally part of a vineyard located on the southeastern boundary of the old town of Zurich, remained open land without buildings. The explosion of the Geissturm in 1652– one of the main fortification towers of Zurich, and located in the actual...
Read moreThe home of the Giacometti’s, the Val Bregaglia is an Italian speaking valley on the south side of the Alps expanding in an extremely deep drop from the heights of the Maloja and the Septimer pass towards south to the Italian border ending in the lowlands of North Italy in Chiavenna. The...
Read morePhilosophy is usually concerned with concepts; abstract concepts like
causality or space and time. Water is not so much a concept as a kind of
pre- or proto-concept: a word that was used before conceptual thinking
really began.
Pieces of water
If you cut this building into two parts,...
Models and images are tools or instruments that provoke the transport or passage of abstract ideas to physical reality.
MODELS
1 Volume
All buildings have a volume, some kind of shape or sculptural presence with a certain definition of the relations between voids and mass. In...