1. Thinking architecture - We think and act through design. Our ultimate tool for thinking and for acting is design. We use design questions as a way to carefully reflect upon multilayered realities. By drawing contemporary issues touching our society out of their usual context and into the architecture school – to discuss them, question them, and design accordingly – we strive to enter a dialogue with the world and produce useful knowledge for the present and the future. Our design briefs often ask inconvenient questions, as a way of prompting an expansion of the tools, the references and the bodies of knowledge we use.
2. Trust - Composing with what and who is already there. We acknowledge that architecture never starts from a clean sheet, but operates within a complex, multitemporal reality in which numerous actors partake. To keep the city alive, inclusive and diverse, our designs consider the pre-existing conditions and users of the sites we work on. Rather than erasing and replacing, we trust in cultivating a closeness, an intimacy and empathy with the spaces and the communities for which we design. This is why we practice inhabitation, why we embed ourselves and confront ourselves to the historical, social, urban and architectural realities we work on. Through this lived experience, we create a personal knowledge and a revaluation of our surroundings.
3. Critical Friends – Being questioned by others. Architecture is not a discipline practiced in isolation. As architects, we strive to remain connected to who we are as individuals and as citizens. Architecture is a porous discipline, and we also consider our own day-to-day spatial experiences as a precious source of information and embodied knowledge. Beyond the canon and beyond the architectural discipline, we exchange and engage with artists, geographers, sociologists, developers, writers, curators, researchers, users, activists and craftspeople. By doing so, we open up new subjectivities and intelligences helping to produce relevant architectural design proposals for rapidly changing contemporary conditions. In this mutual engagement, we often become their critical friends too.
4. Multiplicity - There are many worlds within the world. Our voice is not the only voice in the story and we, architects, cannot consider ourselves as the norm. We work and think from a complex European urban environment, with its layeredness, its diverse populations, its juxtapositions of worldviews, social, cultural and economic realities. When designing, we develop an understanding that every line we draw installs spatial codes and conventions into this reality. Simultaneously, we build criticality and awareness over how we represent the architectures we design and who is represented within them. We become conscious of which world image we communicate, we develop new vocabularies, methodologies and formats.
5. Continually unfinished - Open-ended architectures. Buildings are never finished. They are a movement, continually in the making. Our interaction with a place, usually limited to some years, must be considered as part of much longer cycles. We thus regard architecture beyond an object that should not be touched or changed, beyond the brief of the moment, to try and produce projects that can always do more than what they are asked for. We see design education as a critical and reflexive testing ground for approaches leading to more open-ended architectures. And we orient our teaching towards the production of spatial proposals that unfold possibilities, even ones that are hard to imagine at first.
6. Precedents - The unspectacular as reference. We position ourselves towards the buildings of the past. We approach architectural history as a repository to learn from and we open dialogues with it. We reflect on types and references, on their past and present relevance and their potential meaning to address current needs. At the same time we stand for a dynamic approach to this architectural history. Acknowledging what has been overlooked and excluded, we aim to actively expand it. We strive to learn from the built environment as it is inhabited and appropriated by the people and uses it accommodates. We embrace the complexity, the overlooked, the in-between, the everyday, the seemingly boring.
7. Here & Elsewhere - Correspondences. We understand buildings as part of wide-ranging trajectories of materials and energies. A ceiling lamp in Zurich mobilizes a dam in the Alps. An aluminium profile draws from open-pit mines across the Atlantic. Our urban lives draw tentacular connections between sites of origin, raw materials and transformation processes. We see a necessity in assembling a material literacy: a knowledge of the deep environmental and industrial implications of our constructions, design decisions, and comfort. We thus formulate design topics as well as study trips helping to understand the deep imprint left on the world by architectural objects. This critical reflection on architectural materiality fosters designs that position themselves consciously inside material trajectories, and might be capable of revealing or changing them.
8. Accountability - Building awareness. We consider architecture not only for what it is, but also for what it does. We acknowledge it as an active social and cultural force, and we reflect on the agency of the architect and the architecture. We often play along, and partake in creating the world as it is by building cities and infrastructures. But we can also act as mediators, by adjusting our ways and broadening the views of other stakeholders. To design responsibly, we read the laws, we go over the figures, we study the codes. We equip ourselves, to find loopholes, courage, arguments and space for designing architectures which offer real change.