Re (Reframe, Rearrange, Repeat)
Introduction: 21 February 2023, 09am
Michael Asher, Kunsthalle Bern, 1992, Sherrie Levine, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, 2002
This semester we will continue our return to the tangible. Working on underused industrial sites in Zurich we will re-introduce large scale programmes of production, care and agriculture, alongside places for working and living. By engaging in detail with existing situations and developing new architectures of intensification and addition we will try to find convincing alternatives to the expansion of the agglomeration.
Architecture that responds to current challenges cannot only be a matter of upcycling and the adaptive re-use of existing structures. These are important themes, but for architecture to continue to be culturally relevant we need to discover the beauty that lies within the environmental turn. One way of doing this is to reframe the ways we think about cultural production and challenge the idea of the work of art as an autonomous entity. By engaging directly with the contingencies of material life, perhaps then, can we make a substantial and culturally engaged architecture of today.
To reframe how we think about architecture we will study the ideas and work of six artists. The work of Beverly Buchanan and Robert Smithson suggest productive relationships between sculpture and an expanded idea of archaeology. Sturtevant and Jeff Wall work in the territory between painting and history. Michael Asher and Sherrie Levine articulate and challenge the relationship between production and the institution. These practices all respond to different conditions but are relevant and speak powerfully to us today. The ideas, as well as the formal and material qualities of these artists’ work will inform our search for an architecture and a beauty for the 21st century.
Construction as an integrated discipline is included in this course
Introduction: 21 February 2023, 09:00 am,
location to be announced
FS 2023, ETH Zürich, Studio Caruso
Emilie Appercé, Tibor Bielicky, Adam Caruso, Claudio Schneider, Barbara Thüler