Studio BA3 (Truwant et Rodet)

Today a big amount of our outdoor surfaces is mineralized and sealed in such a way that the water naturally contained in the soil can no longer evaporate. This leaves only one escape route for the water: capillary action through older walls. If the lower part of the facade is sealed with a water-repellent cement coating, the water will rise even higher in the wall, affecting both the exterior and interior façades.

Inside, water condenses on the windowpane. When the pane is replaced with a heavier, thicker, and high-efficiency triple-glazed unit condensation shifts to the wall. Since the adjacent wall has not yet been encased in a thick layer of high-performance polyurethane and the window is too airtight, condensation moves onto the wall. Without any more leakage at the window, mold starts to grow, and the house can no longer breathe. Meanwhile, other species have already taken up residence in this space. The gray mouse, the rat, the dormouse, the ferret, the weasel, they all live in the thickness of our walls. They build nests and tunnels and, feed on the building materials that make up their habitat.

We constantly try to keep out anything unfamiliar, uncomfortable, strange or different. However, the more we fight against it, the more fragile our boundaries become. Architecture often creates a sealed environment that separates: the garden from the living room, the garage from the bedroom, the playground from the kitchen, the hill from the bathroom or, the valley from the office.  Yet, today, the porosity of our environment is essential for ecological restoration. Can we learn to embrace this permeability instead of resisting it?

In the coming academic year, we will explore the potential of the in-between as a transversal space between landscape and architecture. A space that can be all at once organic, tectonic, digital, or nothing at all. A space of transmission, a space for living. A space that could be open for the human, the natural, and the synthetic.

Imagine a space with 9 billion pores, each 20,000 times smaller than a drop of water. It would not let in rain or wind. Yet these pores would be 700 times larger than water vapor molecules and would allow the house to breathe. Now imagine each threshold of this space can move, change, and adapt to surrounding conditions, monitored by millions of digital weather sensors that respond intuitively to the climatic. Imagine a doorway where people meet and interact, like in the art installation by Abramovic and Ulay. They stood naked, facing each other in the museum entrance, forcing visitors to squeeze between them. This narrow space, defined by the presence of two "human pillars", became more perceptible and significant. The threshold transformed into a crucial space, more important than the spaces that precede or follow it.

Together with the students, we will work on the articulation of site-specific spaces in Geneva, exploring this unlikely territory. Our projects will integrate existing structures with the typology of researched case studies through strange encounters, where fiction and reality contaminate each other. The projects will balance between inside and outside, the tectonic and the organic, and the analog and the digital.