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 moreThe 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 moreI will present to you a few projects that sort of represent the trajectory of works I have done over the past 13 years. The works are focal points or images between two aspects: on one hand it is the aspect of a cultural context that is characterized by its constant transitions, ambiguities, and an...
Read moreZurich – Scheuchzerstrasse, 1916-1919
“I was never told that one does something for practical reasons. Nothing was done that might be “useful.” All the things I wanted to grasp were equally valid. I moved along a hundred roads at once without having to hear that any was more...
PROCESS
Constructing a building can be a long process. This is one of those cases.
OPEN SELECTION. SUMMER 2004
The first step was to produce some brief reflections. On the basis of these, plus curriculum and similar documents, the Jury selected five teams.
My initial interest was in...
Crossing the Bergell valley, the memory of the Giacomettis is present through the way they have described the villages and the landscape: Giovanni Giacometti's landscape visions of the valley, the houses and gardens of Stampa painted by Augusto and the landscape reflected by Alberto from the window...
Read moreBuildings in hot and humid climates have been traditionally cooled by ventilation. Wind catchers or what is in Persian called a Baud-Geer have been employed in the arid central regions of Iran and its neighboring countries to provide natural ventilation and passive cooling. The function of the...
Read moreThe long building sits perpendicular to the topography in the middle of the open land, separating the green in a public park infront and a private garden in the back. Inspired by Luigi Moretti's studies about space-sequences of internal rooms in sacral buildings, Patrica Lehner imagined spaces with...
Read moreThe quality of Tobias Tommila’s project is the tfocus on the expression and identity of a cinema.The program of the “Cineteca Svizzera” is a heterogeneous mix of functions with two cinema-halls which are not more than dark and closed rooms. Nevertheless the expressive shape of the roof which...
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