Studio BA3 (Gay et Menzel)

Urban Legends – Trieste

The GayMenzel Studio addresses the context as a source of development of a narrative linked to the site itself. This highlighting tool reveals the inherent qualities of the place and integrates projections or personal aspirations into it, with the broad ambition of reconnection to the environment. Students will develop housing projects in the post-industrial zones of Lausanne and Trieste.

The making of sense

In this time of crisis a reassessment of our way of life is essential. The quality of our relationship with nature, with the territory, with our way of living is questioned. Maybe a solution would be «reso­nance», of which the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa speaks, proposing to us to redefine our rela­tionship with the world, to create what he calls the axes of resonance?

Unveiling narratives

The development of a project strategy is addressed through the narrative, as a crystallization of a specific site vision (understanding) and personal imagination. How does the architect, as a person, as a user, influences and generates anchor points to make places legible, porous and appropriable in order to give them meaning?

Transpositions

The city of Trieste is dominating the homonymous bay and is positioned on a narrow territory below the Karst plateau, connecting the Venetian plain and the peninsula of Istria. Due to its strategic position, the city is an area of great historical density and coexistence of several cultures, local and foreign. From 1717­ and for almost 200 years Trieste flourished as a free port being the main entry of the Habsburg Empire creating a multicultural environment where commerce and arts flourished.

Trieste will give us the opportunity to discuss the plural languages of architecture. During the semester, fragments of the city’s history, in the form of vestibules of characteristic buildings, will be studied and transposed to Switzerland. These will become starting points for the development of housing units in relation to the cities’ industrial heritage – first in Lausanne and then back in Trieste.