#1
WED 22/9, 14:00, Dept of the Ongoing
What is the political economy of architectural type? What is the complicity between type, finance and urban development? In her research project Cooperative Conditions with Anne Kockelkorn, Susanne Schindler departs from the type of the cooperative, to look at the mutual dependency of the architecture of cooperative housing and its political and economic regulation. By looking at the form of architecture and the city in conjunction with the history of this particular political economy of housing, the research articulates scopes of action for architects today.
Susanne Schindler is an architect and historian focused on the intersection of policy and design in housing. She is co-director of the MAS program in history and theory of architecture at gta, ETH Zurich.
#2
WED 13/10, 12:30, Dept of the Ongoing
As a kind of archaeology of the present, researcher and cultural worker Diana Bärmann has closely examined the interim uses of the Labitzke site in Zurich: a former paint factory that hosted car repair shops, migrant associations, night clubs, residential communities, a mosque, and even a brothel for about 25 years. A unique place that became a social laboratory for new forms of coexistence. Diana Bärmann tells the area's story from the inside, as she was a resident of the site herself.
Diana Bärmann is a researcher and cultural worker. In 2021 she published the book Labitzke Farben – Archäologische Untersuchung einer Stadtutopie with Hochparterre.
#3
WED 20/10, 2 pm, Dept of the Ongoing
How to relate type to use, and trace it back to the user? For architect Anne Lacaton “the concept of inhabiting is very important. It doesn’t only relate to housing: in French, ‘habiter’ means the state of being somewhere: space is whatever its use is. Starting from this principle, even though our projects have distinct programmes, functions and users, they all propose generosity of space, freedom of use, and possibility of appropriation.” In this talk, Anne Lacaton will talk about their proposal for the MAAG Areal.
Anne Lacaton is an architect and professor. She runs the architectural practice Lacaton & Vassal, with Jean-Philippe Vassal, awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2021.
#4
WED 27/10, 12:30, Dept of the Ongoing
The value of cities relies on the inhabitation of difference, the cohabitation of multi-layered realities constantly coinciding and interacting. According to architect and planner Khensani de Klerk, precarious living, embodied in precarious and unrecognised types, largely remain relegated to informality and with it, connotations of unreliability, high risk and chaos. However, many of the systems that encode the functioning of these informal types are thoroughly thought out systems that one could argue are even more sophisticated than many types in the formal world, but lack the material quality of those governed by formality. How do we build up coalitions and recognize interdependency between both?
Khensani de Klerk is an architectural researcher and designer from Johannesburg. She is part of the Dept. of the Ongoing at the Chair of Affective Architectures. She is founder and co-director of Matri-Archi(tecture) collective (SA, CH), an editorial contributor at the Architectural Review (UK) and head of research and development at Studio8Fold (UK).
#5
TUES 9/11, 5 pm, zoom: https://ethz.zoom.us/j/66000077442
In her provocative PhD research, architect Anna Puigjaner makes a call for kitchenless cities, questioning individualized types of domesticity, and proposing domestic models anchored on collectivity. Puigjaner’s PhD lends from the family hotel typology, a “hybrid that combined the European apartment with the American hotel.” For decades, developers had successfully exploited a loophole in the legal definition distinguishing permanent homes from hotels, which didn’t require food preparation areas to be housed within dwelling units. Cutting out kitchens increased the number and variety of apartments. To Puigjaner this proved felicitous and “led to a greater interdependency between the house and the community, creating stronger social and urban bonds between the domestic and public spheres—without the kitchen, relations between the inhabitants were encouraged.”
Anna Puigjaner is an architect, researcher and associate professor at Columbia GSADD, and co-founder of Barcelona-based MAIO Architects.
All lectures take place in the Dept. of the Ongoing, Althardstrasse 70b, Winkelbau 1, 4th floor 8105 Regensdorf (just opposite the Regensdorf station), except for Anna Puigjaner and Marie-Avril Berthet (TBD) who will speak via zoom.