Alexandre Theriot: Catalogue data in Spring Semester 2021

Name Prof. Alexandre Theriot
FieldArchitecture and Design
Address
Professur f. Architekt. u. Entwurf
ETH Zürich, ONA J 25
Neunbrunnenstr. 50
8093 Zürich
SWITZERLAND
E-mailtheriot@arch.ethz.ch
DepartmentArchitecture
RelationshipFull Professor

NumberTitleECTSHoursLecturers
052-0570-21LLecture Series Design and Architecture: One Building (Part 1) Information 2 credits1VE. Christ, A. Antonakakis, R. Boltshauser, A. Deuber, A. Holtrop, C. Kerez, E. Prats Güerre, A. Theriot
AbstractThe lecture series of the Institute of Design and Architecture - in the FS21 provides students with an overview of the various positions of the teachers within the IEA (Institute Design in Architecture).
Learning objectiveThe lecture series of the Institute of Design and Architecture - in the FS21 provides students with an overview of the various positions of the teachers within the IEA (Institute Design in Architecture).

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052-1152-21LArchitectural Design V-IX: Borderline(s) Investigation #5 Visibility (A. Theriot) Information Restricted registration - show details
Please register (www.mystudies.ethz.ch) only after the internal enrolment for the design classes (see http://www.einschreibung.arch.ethz.ch/design.php).
Students who do not wish to change the design class don't have to participate in the internal enrolment.

Project grading at semester end is based on the list of enrolments on 2nd April 2021, 24:00 h. This is the ultimate deadline to unsubscribe or enroll for the studio!
14 credits16UA. Theriot
AbstractWe aim to seize economic requirements to transform constraints into levers, producers of qualities. These may well be tangible or intangible, prosaic or poetic, constant or unstable, general or occasional… As long as they are initiated by the economy and located far from any rationality. Creating generosity, “excesses” that make the strength and uniqueness of a place.
Learning objectiveCHAP 1: MYTHOLOGY
CHAP 2: FINDING FREEDOMS
CHAP 3: BINDING FRAGMENTS

Mandatory workshop on site (Zürich) with photographer Johannes Schwarz: 06-07.03.2021

INTEGRATED WORKSHOPS:
Three sessions with Raphael Hefti
Photography with Johannes Schwarz
3D visualisations with Olivier Campagne
Structure with Enrique Lluis
Façade and enveloppe with Gontran Dufour
Building climate with Illias Hischier
Artist Book with Julie Peeters

VISIBILITY AND ITS HIDDEN DIMENSIONS
If something catches the eye, what is next to it will be mechanically less looked at. For a light to appear, it has to emerge from the surrounding darkness. And what attracts the light often leaves its surroundings in shadow. Hence an implacable theorem: the visible is always born from the invisible.
Reflecting on visibility therefore leads us to first question invisibility. What do we not want to see? At home? Around ourselves? In the city? What are the reasons why visibility can be an annoyance? For reasons of comfort, modesty, social decency?
In the field of architecture and town planning, the visible and the invisible play a pas de deux at all scales. The first decision on the visible comes from the architect himself. Does he want his building to stand out? Is it different from its neighbours? Or on the contrary, does he want to blend in with its context? It also depends on the choice of the setting. The Haussmanian buildings were conscious of being part of a whole, ordered by a few strict rules of alignment. However, this did not prevent variations in the way the buildings were distinguished from one another.
What choice should be made in the visible? This is the very question of urban planning. What deserves to be visible? What should be made invisible in the city? Less noble programmes, sometimes deliberately hidden by infrastructure (to take an extreme example, waste disposal sites under motorway slip roads), or linked to secrecy or security (military zones). Contemporary cartography is thus full of blurred areas. But the blurring of Google Street View is also due to a basic rule of privacy, since it applies in detail to the number plates of cars and the faces of passers-by.
ContentIf something catches the eye, what is next to it will be mechanically less looked at. For a light to appear, it has to emerge from the surrounding darkness. And what attracts the light often leaves its surroundings in shadow. Hence an implacable theorem: the visible is always born from the invisible.

Reflecting on visibility therefore leads us to first question invisibility. What do we not want to see? At home? Around ourselves? In the city? What are the reasons why visibility can be an annoyance? For reasons of comfort, modesty, social decency?

In the field of architecture and town planning, the visible and the invisible play a pas de deux at all scales. The first decision on the visible comes from the architect himself. Does he want his building to stand out? Is it different from its neighbours? Or on the contrary, does he want to blend in with its context? It also depends on the choice of the setting. The Haussmanian buildings were conscious of being part of a whole, ordered by a few strict rules of alignment. However, this did not prevent variations in the way the buildings were distinguished from one another.

What choice should be made in the visible? This is the very question of urban planning. What deserves to be visible? What should be made invisible in the city? Less noble programmes, sometimes deliberately hidden by infrastructure (to take an extreme example, waste disposal sites under motorway slip roads), or linked to secrecy or security (military zones). Contemporary cartography is thus full of blurred areas. But the blurring of Google Street View is also due to a basic rule of privacy, since it applies in detail to the number plates of cars and the faces of passers-by.
LiteratureVisibility and movement
There are also territories where one does not stop, places devoted to transit and exchange (business and industrial zones, areas near railway stations or airports, etc.). From these places, we can only have a partial vision, but also a vision in movement, a dynamic vision. From then on, they call for an architecture that adapts itself to this new speed of vision, and which opens onto another imaginary world. The history of art is full of these regenerations: the impressionists who revealed a new Paris by painting the "hidden banks" of the capital on the outskirts of the stations; street-art which gives back a cyma value to the gable walls, elements a priori the least worthy of attention in architecture.

Visibility and intimacy
There is a "hidden dimension" (to use the title of Edward T. Hall's famous essay) that concerns our bubbles of intimacy, which vary according to times and cultures. These spheres remain the founding gauge of the human relationship with architecture. At what distance is a vis-à-vis acceptable? At what point does one start to see too much? Where is the boundary between proximity and voyeurism? Here we touch a balance, both intimate and social, between the visible and the invisible. What's more, we are living at a time when the apprehension of these "bubbles" is being altered by the health crisis.
Beyond crises, the flavour of architecture is also to invent subterfuges to palliate certain a priori embarrassing situations. Domestic invention is often haunted by the need to "see without being seen" (moucharabiehs, sunbreakers, blinds...). And on the more global scale of the building, the cladding and the envelope obviously also bring into play this relationship between the shown and the hidden. Finally, in the history of architecture, progress has often been associated with the notions of transparency and fluidity, even if this has led to numerous ambiguities. Fully glazed office buildings do they not induce an implicit "panoptic" type of surveillance (everyone can see everyone, including from the outside). But the nuances of the glass material are such that it is also possible to play with reflections or translucencies, which let the light through but deliberately filter the gaze.

Visibility and illusion
The gaze is, in any case, fallible and to take note of it is also to explore new areas of the visible. The art of trompe l'oeil works on certain productive ironies between painting and architecture (the frescoes in the Hall of Giants in the Té Palace in Mantua, a simulacrum of a building collapse, or closer to us, the "masking" of the Louvre Pyramid by J.R.). This art of camouflage does not always have artistic aims.

Visibility and new tools
The change in the way we look at things is also accompanied by an addiction to new tools. The advent of the digital image has had an unexpected consequence: in the cinema, in photography, on television, the nights are sharper! Contours are better defined. Humans seem to have the vision of a cat! While the silver image better restores the density of the night, this darkness is both compact and indistinct, endowed with an enveloping dimension, with the impression that one can get lost in it. A digital night simply makes you believe that you have "dimmed the light" of the day, not that day and night are two opposing reigns.
Let's go even further into the sub-light spectrum and technological innovation with thermal cameras. These reveal new images that owe as much to medical imaging (moving X-rays) as to the Gothic imagination (ghostly silhouettes and moving spectra). Here, secret and invisible, but equally structuring flows are made visible. The cartography becomes more complete.
This is yet another "hidden dimension", that of the structuring of matter. In this respect, the most convincing and poetic
Prerequisites / NoticeGroup work only.

Introduction: 23.02.2021 at 10:00
Site visit: 06-07.03.2021 (weekend) Zürich

Critics: 17.03.2021, 28.04.2021 and 04.06.2021

Costs: CHF 150.--