Cara Daggett - THE BIRTH OF ENERGY Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2023-09-20 | 01.12.2022Cara Daggett - THE BIRTH OF ENERGYEnergy, work, and power are intertwined, both in the scientific definition of energy (the ability to do work), and in the political manifestation of human-fuel practices. The energy-work-power connection continues to haunt attempts to divest from fossil fuels. Fossil fuel advocates rely upon the threat of job loss and energy dependency to mobilise affection for oil, coal or gas, but many renewable energy advocates also adopt this framework in calls for a just energy transition. Doing so helps keep modern energy cultures yoked to extractivism. In this talk, I will trace the historical emergence of the relationship between energy and work, focusing upon how work came to be understood and valued as a site of energy transformation. The energy-work ethos informed the emergent fossil fuel culture, wherein technical categories of work and waste intersect with racialised, and gendered, judgments of productivity and sloth. Thinking about energy historically suggests that shifting our fuel cultures will require a corresponding shift in (post)-industrial cultures of work and Western understandings of freedom.Cara Daggett is an assistant professor of political science in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech. She holds a bachelor’s degree in biochemical sciences from Harvard University, a master’s degree in international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a doctorate in political science from Johns Hopkins University. Her research explores the politics of energy and the environment in an era of planetary disruption. She is interested in questions that lie at the nexus of human well-being, science, technology, and the more-than-human world. Her work often draws upon feminist approaches to power in order to understand how global warming emerged, as well as how it might be mitigated. Daggett’s book, The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (Duke, 2019), traces the genealogy of energy back to the nineteenth-century science of thermodynamics to challenge the underlying logic that informs today’s uses of energy. The book argues that only by transforming the politics of work—most notably, the veneration of waged work—will we be able to confront the Anthropocene’s energy problem.The lecture is part of the talk series MY ENERGY within the core course Architecture of Territory: Territorial Design in Histories, Theories and Projects.CONCEPT AND REALISATIONChair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica TopalovićDr. Nazlı Tümerdem VIDEO RECORDING AND EDITINGQianer ZhuGRAPHIC DESIGNGoda BudvytyteBOOK BINDINGMichiel GiebenThis lecture series sets up an agenda for widening the disciplinary field of architecture and urbanism from their focus on the city, or the urban in the narrow sense, to wider territorial scales, which correspond to the increasing scales of contemporary urbanisation. It discusses the concepts of territory and urbanisation, and their implications for the work of architects and urbanists.MY ENERGYWithin the theme My Energy, the four guest speakers engaged in fields ranging from energy humanities and feminist political ecology to urban history and urban design, will approach the notions such as energy transition, decarbonisation, genealogy of energy, and urban microclimates.The course will enable students to critically discuss concepts of territory and urbanisation. It will invite students to revisit the history of architects’ work engaging with the problematic of urbanising territories and territorial organisation. The goal is to motivate and equip students to engage with territory in the present day and age, by setting out our contemporary urban agenda. The lectures are animated by a series of visual and conceptual exercises, usually on A4 sheets of paper. All original student contributions will be collected and bound together, creating a unique book-object. Some of the exercises are graded and count as proof of completion.
Feifei Zhou - MULTISPECIES WORLDBUILDING Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2023-12-12 | 14.10.2021Feifei Zhou - MULTISPECIES WORLDBUILDINGHumans did not produce the Anthropocene alone—the world we live in is a result of complex histories of multispecies interactions. Our built environments are shifting the rhythms and cycles of both humans and nonhumans (though unevenly), and such (non)human responses to the built environment are critical for us to acknowledge and comprehend through ecological studies. Multispecies perspectives are essential.Through combining narrative-based illustrations and critical spatial analysis, this lecture will present how visual representations work with scientific discoveries in order to offer a new approaches in spatial studies. Using multi-scalar, cross-chronological, and trans-regional methods of mapping and narrative forming, these drawings aim to show possibilities of transdisciplinary efforts in illuminating socio-spatial and ecological patterns and injustices.Feifei Zhou is a Chinese-born artist and architect. She was a guest researcher at Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA), during which she co-edited the digital publication Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene (Stanford University Press, 2020) with anthropologists Anna Tsing, Jennifer Deger, and Alder Keleman Saxena. Her work explores spatial, cultural, and ecological impacts of the industrialised built environment. She currently teaches MA and BA Architecture at Central Saint Martins, London.The lecture is part of the talk series MY SPECIES within the core course Architecture of Territory: Territorial Design in Histories, Theories, and Projects.CONCEPT AND REALISATIONChair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica TopalovićDr. Nazlı Tümerdem VIDEO EDITINGQianer ZhuGRAPHIC DESIGNGoda BudvytyteBOOK BINDINGMichiel GiebenThis lecture series sets up an agenda for widening the disciplinary field of architecture and urbanism from their focus on the city, or the urban in the narrow sense, to wider territorial scales, which correspond to the increasing scales of contemporary urbanisation. It discusses the concepts of territory and urbanisation, and their implications for the work of architects and urbanists.MY $PECIESWithin the theme My Species, the four guest speakers (Feifei Zhou, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Florianne Koechlin, and Oxana Timofeeva) engaged in fields ranging from art and landscape representation to bioethics and environmental philosophy, will approach territory through the notions such as multispecies, coexistence, and diversity. With a more-than-human perspective on the territory, the guest speakers will elaborate their take on “telling horrible stories in beautiful ways,” debate “the dignity of plants,” expound upon “mankind’s fascination to better the world,” and confer “the non-human turn” and what is to come after.The course will enable students to critically discuss concepts of territory and urbanisation. It will invite students to revisit the history of architects’ work engaging with the problematic of urbanising territories and territorial organisation. The goal is to motivate and equip students to engage with territory in the present day and age, by setting out our contemporary urban agenda. The lectures are animated by a series of visual and conceptual exercises, usually on A4 sheets of paper. All original student contributions will be collected and bound together, creating a unique book-object. Some of the exercises are graded and count as proof of completion.
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg - BETTER NATURE Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2023-12-12 | 21.10.2021Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg - BETTER NATUREDR ALEXANDRA DAISY GINSBERG is an artist examining our fraught relationships with nature and technology. Through artworks, writing, and curatorial projects, Daisy’s work explores subjects as diverse as artificial intelligence, exobiology, synthetic biology, conservation, biodiversity, and evolution, as she investigates the human impulse to “better” the world. But what does better mean? Who is it better for? And who gets to decide? Ginsberg will address these questions through discussion of some of her recent artworks, including resurrecting the smell of extinct flowers (now on view at the Natural History Museum Bern) and her upcoming commission for pollinators at the Eden Project Cornwall. As humanity slowly acknowledges the impact of our progress on the natural world, and the need to make a damaged nature better, we have to ask: what does better mean?She has spent over ten years experimentally engaging with the field of synthetic biology, developing new roles for artists and designers. She is lead author of Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology’s Designs on Nature (MIT Press, 2014), and in 2017 completed Better, her PhD by practice, at London’s Royal College of Art (RCA), interrogating how powerful dreams of “better” futures shape the things that get designed. She read architecture at the University of Cambridge, was a visiting scholar at Harvard University, and received her MA in Design Interactions from the RCA.The lecture is part of the talk series MY SPECIES within the core course Architecture of Territory: Territorial Design in Histories, Theories, and Projects.CONCEPT AND REALISATIONChair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica TopalovićDr. Nazlı Tümerdem VIDEO EDITINGQianer ZhuGRAPHIC DESIGNGoda BudvytyteBOOK BINDINGMichiel GiebenThis lecture series sets up an agenda for widening the disciplinary field of architecture and urbanism from their focus on the city, or the urban in the narrow sense, to wider territorial scales, which correspond to the increasing scales of contemporary urbanisation. It discusses the concepts of territory and urbanisation, and their implications for the work of architects and urbanists.MY $PECIESWithin the theme My Species, the four guest speakers (Feifei Zhou, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Florianne Koechlin, and Oxana Timofeeva) engaged in fields ranging from art and landscape representation to bioethics and environmental philosophy, will approach territory through the notions such as multispecies, coexistence, and diversity. With a more-than-human perspective on the territory, the guest speakers will elaborate their take on “telling horrible stories in beautiful ways,” debate “the dignity of plants,” expound upon “mankind’s fascination to better the world,” and confer “the non-human turn” and what is to come after.The course will enable students to critically discuss concepts of territory and urbanisation. It will invite students to revisit the history of architects’ work engaging with the problematic of urbanising territories and territorial organisation. The goal is to motivate and equip students to engage with territory in the present day and age, by setting out our contemporary urban agenda. The lectures are animated by a series of visual and conceptual exercises, usually on A4 sheets of paper. All original student contributions will be collected and bound together, creating a unique book-object. Some of the exercises are graded and count as proof of completion.
Florianne Koechlin - TOMATOES TALK, BIRCH TREES LEARN—DO PLANTS HAVE DIGNITY? Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2023-12-12 | 11.11.21Florianne Koechlin - TOMATOES TALK, BIRCH TREES LEARN—DO PLANTS HAVE DIGNITY?Plants communicate with each other and with other organisms, through scents. They send out SOS-signals, warn each other, attract beneficial insects, coordinate their behaviour. They build up multiple relationships with other organisms. They remember past events, learn from experience. So plants are not “living automatons,” just following their genetic program and always reacting the same way. What are the consequences of this new way of seeing plants? Do they have dignity, even rights?FLORIANNE KOECHLIN, born in 1948, is a Swiss biologist and chemist. In the 1980s she played a key role in the protest against the planned construction of the Kaiseraugst nuclear power plant and was one of the founding members of the Basel appeal against genetic engineering. In 1995 she played a leading role in founding GENET, a Europe-wide network of NGOs critical of genetic engineering. In January 1999 she founded the Blueridge-Institute, which deals with the “critical assessment of genetic engineering projects and developments” and of which she is the Managing Director to this day. She explores new scientific findings about plants and other living beings (particularly communication between plants and their use of networks) and new concepts for agriculture and research strategies for this purpose. Her task is the translation of expert knowledge into concepts that are easily understood by the general public. She is also a non-fiction author dealing primarily with the subjects of genetic engineering, epigenetics, plant communication and the ethical implications of modern biology. She also paints.The lecture is part of the talk series MY SPECIES within the core course Architecture of Territory: Territorial Design in Histories, Theories, and Projects.CONCEPT AND REALISATIONChair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica TopalovićDr. Nazlı Tümerdem VIDEO EDITINGQianer ZhuGRAPHIC DESIGNGoda BudvytyteBOOK BINDINGMichiel GiebenThis lecture series sets up an agenda for widening the disciplinary field of architecture and urbanism from their focus on the city, or the urban in the narrow sense, to wider territorial scales, which correspond to the increasing scales of contemporary urbanisation. It discusses the concepts of territory and urbanisation, and their implications for the work of architects and urbanists.MY $PECIESWithin the theme My Species, the four guest speakers (Feifei Zhou, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Florianne Koechlin, and Oxana Timofeeva) engaged in fields ranging from art and landscape representation to bioethics and environmental philosophy, will approach territory through the notions such as multispecies, coexistence, and diversity. With a more-than-human perspective on the territory, the guest speakers will elaborate their take on “telling horrible stories in beautiful ways,” debate “the dignity of plants,” expound upon “mankind’s fascination to better the world,” and confer “the non-human turn” and what is to come after.The course will enable students to critically discuss concepts of territory and urbanisation. It will invite students to revisit the history of architects’ work engaging with the problematic of urbanising territories and territorial organisation. The goal is to motivate and equip students to engage with territory in the present day and age, by setting out our contemporary urban agenda. The lectures are animated by a series of visual and conceptual exercises, usually on A4 sheets of paper. All original student contributions will be collected and bound together, creating a unique book-object. Some of the exercises are graded and count as proof of completion.
Oxana Timofeeva - WHAT IS SOUL? ON THE IDEA OF SPECIES BEING Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2023-12-12 | 25.11.2021Oxana Timofeeva - WHAT IS SOUL? ON THE IDEA OF SPECIES BEINGThe talk will address the idea of the soul as it is presented in the philosophical tradition since antiquity, particularly to the traditional division, introduced by Plato and Aristotle, about the three parts or three kinds of the soul: plant, animal, and human. In the history of philosophy, this division persists through centuries, and every philosopher makes emphasis on some particular elements of it in order to conceptualise the human exception, but there is more than that. Thus, Marx, uses the term “species-being” to define a universal character of human activity. I will mostly talk, however, not about humans, but about the basic element of this construction, the plant, with the aim to demonstrate its own intrinsic universality, which makes possible to talk about the human plant.OXANA TIMOFEEVA is Sc.D., professor at “Stasis” Center for Philosophy at the European University at St. Petersburg, leading researcher at Tyumen State University, member of the artistic collective “Chto Delat” (“What is to be done”), deputy editor of the journal Stasis, and the author of books History of Animals (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018; Maastricht: Jan van Eyck, 2012; trans. into Russian, Turkish, Slovenian, and Persian), Introduction to the Erotic Philosophy of Georges Bataille (Moscow: New Literary Observer, 2009), How to Love a Homeland (Moscow, syg.ma, 2020; Cairo: Kayfa ta, 2020; trans. into Arabic), Solar Politics (forthcoming), and other writings.The lecture is part of the talk series MY SPECIES within the core course Architecture of Territory: Territorial Design in Histories, Theories, and Projects.CONCEPT AND REALISATIONChair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica TopalovićDr. Nazlı Tümerdem VIDEO EDITINGQianer ZhuGRAPHIC DESIGNGoda BudvytyteBOOK BINDINGMichiel GiebenThis lecture series sets up an agenda for widening the disciplinary field of architecture and urbanism from their focus on the city, or the urban in the narrow sense, to wider territorial scales, which correspond to the increasing scales of contemporary urbanisation. It discusses the concepts of territory and urbanisation, and their implications for the work of architects and urbanists.MY $PECIESWithin the theme My Species, the four guest speakers (Feifei Zhou, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Florianne Koechlin, and Oxana Timofeeva) engaged in fields ranging from art and landscape representation to bioethics and environmental philosophy, will approach territory through the notions such as multispecies, coexistence, and diversity. With a more-than-human perspective on the territory, the guest speakers will elaborate their take on “telling horrible stories in beautiful ways,” debate “the dignity of plants,” expound upon “mankind’s fascination to better the world,” and confer “the non-human turn” and what is to come after.The course will enable students to critically discuss concepts of territory and urbanisation. It will invite students to revisit the history of architects’ work engaging with the problematic of urbanising territories and territorial organisation. The goal is to motivate and equip students to engage with territory in the present day and age, by setting out our contemporary urban agenda. The lectures are animated by a series of visual and conceptual exercises, usually on A4 sheets of paper. All original student contributions will be collected and bound together, creating a unique book-object. Some of the exercises are graded and count as proof of completion.
Alexandra Arènes - CRITICAL ZONES: SENSORS FOR GHOST LANDSCAPES Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2023-12-12 | 01.10.2020 Alexandra Arènes - CRITICAL ZONES: SENSORS FOR GHOST LANDSCAPESGhost Landscapes refer both to abandoned and ruined lands, but also to territories from which resources are extracted for use in other countries. Recognizing these ghosts is a difficult task because there is no clear definition of their boundaries, scales and composition. At least if we only try to represent them with traditional maps and satellite instruments that give us views from above. To better understand what a landscape is made of and what their trajectories are, we need other sensors: to understand the composition and behavior of landscape entities that we took for granted, such as rivers, soils, trees, which once we follow them with the instrumentation of earth scientists appear in a completely different form. Critical zone sciences are meant to help us understand critical places on earth where life is threatened, where the roles of actors, human and non-human, are unclear, but far from giving clear answers, critical zones leave us in a state of uncertainty. Perhaps this uncertainty is the real challenge of this century for architecture at the time of the Anthropocene. Through her fields trips to sites where scientists are working, and through visual research and an exhibition, she will describe what she found in the critical zone observatories that might render us sensible to the dynamics of the damaged Earth.Alexandra Arènes is a French landscape architect and now a PhD researcher at the University of Manchester. She co-founded SOC (Société d’Objets Cartographiques) in 2016, a think tank on earth political design, drawing on scientific and public enquiries, and producing workshops and exhibitions. The studio designed the installation CZO space at the ZKM (Museum for Art and Media, Karlsruhe) for the exhibition Critical Zones. Observatories for Earthly Politics (curated by Bruno Latour, 2020), the result of close collaboration between science and art. She has also contributed to theater research (INSIDE, Back to Earth, Où atterrir?), and co-authored the book Terra Forma, Manuel de Cartographies Potentielles (B42, 2019).The lecture is part of the talk series MY EARTH within the core course Architecture of Territory: Territorial Design in Histories, Theories, and Projects.CONCEPT AND REALISATIONChair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica TopalovićDr. Charlotte Malterre-BarthesMetaxia MarkakiDr. Gyler MydytiDr. Nazlı Tümerdem VIDEO EDITINGQianer ZhuGRAPHIC DESIGNGoda BudvytyteBOOK BINDINGMichiel GiebenThis lecture series sets up an agenda for widening the disciplinary field of architecture and urbanism from their focus on the city, or the urban in the narrow sense, to wider territorial scales, which correspond to the increasing scales of contemporary urbanisation. It discusses the concepts of territory and urbanisation, and their implications for the work of architects and urbanists.MY EARTHWithin the program, five guest speakers are invited to open up perspectives on territory as Earth and the manifold meanings it embodies: Earth as a living world, a world-system, earth as soil, as land, as field, and even as dirt. By looking at the Earth and its ecologies, the guest speakers will propose novel and urgent approaches to territory and urbanisation: from “Gaia-graphy” of Earth’s critical zones, and emergence of urban soil mapping as tool in urban design, to working with “dirt” in order to develop an ethics of care and maintenance for precarious environments.The course will enable students to critically discuss concepts of territory and urbanisation. It will invite students to revisit the history of architects’ work engaging with the problematic of urbanising territories and territorial organisation. The goal is to motivate and equip students to engage with territory in the present day and age, by setting out our contemporary urban agenda. The lectures are animated by a series of visual and conceptual exercises, usually on A4 sheets of paper. All original student contributions will be collected and bound together, creating a unique book-object. Some of the exercises are graded and count as proof of completion.
Antoine Vialle - URBAN SOILS MAPPING: CASE WEST LAUSANNE Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2023-12-12 | 15.10.2020 Antoine Vialle - URBAN SOILS MAPPING: CASE WEST LAUSANNEMotivated by ever-increasing soil degradation and artificialisation due to past and present urban growth dynamics, the current trend of spatial planning policies at the European and Swiss levels is promoting increased soil protection, by avoiding new developments on agricultural—natural land, and by reorienting development towards existing urban areas that must be densified and restructured. This objective, which is formulated as “inward urbanisation”, not only puts pressure on the soils situated within urban areas, which are cast as priority development targets, but also give a strategic role to this significant component of anthropogenic ecosystems, the multifunctionality of which must be considered as a crucial driver facing cities’ forthcoming social-ecological transition.However, urban soils are insufficiently studied as a long-term record of environmental history and heavy anthropisation. In this context, the originality of this research is to consider urbanisation not only as consuming and degrading, but also as transforming and producing soils, and to provide a methodology for the study of anthropedogenesis as a coevolution process of urban forms and soil functionalities, both in historical—retrospective and projective ways. Spatial development and urbanisation appear therefore not only as a threat to soil capital, but also as a key lever on which it is possible to act in order to valorise this resource.Such a narrative integrates various facets of land use, including one-off construction techniques and recurring maintenance practices, planning tools, and morphologies, into a specific ‘project for the ground’ which brought forth the mixed mesh of the Swiss Plateau ‘city-territory.’ Ultimately, in light of the ongoing planning policies, the dynamic vision conveyed by these intertwined soil–urbanisation coevolution trajectories outlines opportunities and strategies and for the regeneration of the resource deposit made up of both West Lausanne’s urban fabric and its soils. Such opportunities and strategies, which aim at a sustainable implementation of the inward urbanisation principle, rest in the understanding of both West Lausanne city-territory and its urban soils as ‘palimpsests’ forming a dynamic system.Antoine Vialle is Architect (2007) and Former Fellow of the French Academy in Rome—Villa Medici (2010–11). He has been Scientific Assistant and Lecturer in various schools since 2011 and is currently developing a PhD on the soils of the Swiss city-territory at the EPFL Laboratory of Urbanism with Profs. Paola Viganò (EPFL Lab U) and Éric Verrecchia (UNIL IDYST). In 2019, he was Doctoral Visiting Student at the MIT Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism in Cambridge, MA.The lecture is part of the talk series MY EARTH within the core course Architecture of Territory: Territorial Design in Histories, Theories, and Projects.CONCEPT AND REALISATIONChair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica TopalovićDr. Charlotte Malterre-BarthesMetaxia MarkakiDr. Gyler MydytiDr. Nazlı Tümerdem VIDEO EDITINGQianer ZhuGRAPHIC DESIGNGoda BudvytyteBOOK BINDINGMichiel GiebenThis lecture series sets up an agenda for widening the disciplinary field of architecture and urbanism from their focus on the city, or the urban in the narrow sense, to wider territorial scales, which correspond to the increasing scales of contemporary urbanisation. It discusses the concepts of territory and urbanisation, and their implications for the work of architects and urbanists.MY EARTHWithin the program, five guest speakers are invited to open up perspectives on territory as Earth and the manifold meanings it embodies: Earth as a living world, a world-system, earth as soil, as land, as field, and even as dirt. By looking at the Earth and its ecologies, the guest speakers will propose novel and urgent approaches to territory and urbanisation: from “Gaia-graphy” of Earth’s critical zones, and emergence of urban soil mapping as tool in urban design, to working with “dirt” in order to develop an ethics of care and maintenance for precarious environments.The course will enable students to critically discuss concepts of territory and urbanisation. It will invite students to revisit the history of architects’ work engaging with the problematic of urbanising territories and territorial organisation. The goal is to motivate and equip students to engage with territory in the present day and age, by setting out our contemporary urban agenda. The lectures are animated by a series of visual and conceptual exercises, usually on A4 sheets of paper. All original student contributions will be collected and bound together, creating a unique book-object. Some of the exercises are graded and count as proof of completion.
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes - ARABLE LANDS LOST LANDS Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2023-12-12 | 12.11.2020Charlotte Malterre-Barthes - ARABLE LANDS LOST LANDSApproaching land as a finite resource and investigating the decline in available agrarian land, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes uses land reform in Egypt as a case study to identify urban growth as the consumer of agrarian land by accentuating the dynamics arising from relationships between land tenure, agriculture and urbanisation.Malterre-Barthes is an architect, scholar, and assistant professor of urban design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Principal of the urban design agency OMNIBUS, she directed the MAS Urban Design at the Chair of Marc Angélil (2014-2019), and holds a PhD from ETH Zurich on the effects of the political economy of food on the built environment, case study Egypt. She recently published Migrant Marseille: Architectures of Social Segregation and Urban Inclusivity (Berlin, Ruby Press), and co-authored Eileen Gray: A House under the Sun (London, Nobrow), Some Haunted Spaces in Singapore (Edition Patrick Frey), and Housing Cairo: The Informal Response (Berlin, Ruby Press).The lecture is part of the talk series MY EARTH within the core course Architecture of Territory: Territorial Design in Histories, Theories, and Projects.CONCEPT AND REALISATIONChair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica TopalovićDr. Charlotte Malterre-BarthesMetaxia MarkakiDr. Gyler MydytiDr. Nazlı Tümerdem VIDEO EDITINGQianer ZhuGRAPHIC DESIGNGoda BudvytyteBOOK BINDINGMichiel GiebenThis lecture series sets up an agenda for widening the disciplinary field of architecture and urbanism from their focus on the city, or the urban in the narrow sense, to wider territorial scales, which correspond to the increasing scales of contemporary urbanisation. It discusses the concepts of territory and urbanisation, and their implications for the work of architects and urbanists.MY EARTHWithin the program, five guest speakers are invited to open up perspectives on territory as Earth and the manifold meanings it embodies: Earth as a living world, a world-system, earth as soil, as land, as field, and even as dirt. By looking at the Earth and its ecologies, the guest speakers will propose novel and urgent approaches to territory and urbanisation: from “Gaia-graphy” of Earth’s critical zones, and emergence of urban soil mapping as tool in urban design, to working with “dirt” in order to develop an ethics of care and maintenance for precarious environments.The course will enable students to critically discuss concepts of territory and urbanisation. It will invite students to revisit the history of architects’ work engaging with the problematic of urbanising territories and territorial organisation. The goal is to motivate and equip students to engage with territory in the present day and age, by setting out our contemporary urban agenda. The lectures are animated by a series of visual and conceptual exercises, usually on A4 sheets of paper. All original student contributions will be collected and bound together, creating a unique book-object. Some of the exercises are graded and count as proof of completion.
Hélène Frichot - DIRTY THEORY: DIRT AND DECOLONISATION Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2023-12-12 | 26.11.2020Hélène Frichot - DIRTY THEORY: DIRT AND DECOLONISATIONEven though its collected materials were based on thoughts gathered in an electronic folder over a number of years, the brief book Dirty Theory: Troubling Architecture (2019) was written in a rush of enthusiasm and constitutes little more than a collection of notes to self. The final chapter before the conclusion fleetingly raises the question of dirt and (de)colonisation, which inevitably leads to questions of practices of extraction. Extraction and extractivism not only direct attention to mass disruptions and redistributions of the earth’s surface in this geological epoch of the so-called Anthropocene, including associated impacts on mental and social ecologies, but constitute a burgeoning terrain of discourse across the Environmental Humanities. This lecture aims to deepen the discussion raised in the relevant chapter of Dirty Theory, with a focus on the extraction and subsequent transmogrifications of dirt that take place when mobilised from one site to the next. The mobilisation of dirt impacts social relations, benefiting some, disadvantaging others according to the persistent violence of a colonial logic subsequently fast-tracked within a neoliberal integrated world capitalism. This notion of how dirt in one location is revalued as an object of reverence (for use and exchange) elsewhere, is something that was already ventured in Mary Douglas’s famous ethnographic work on the sacred and the profane. It is a material transformation that becomes vivid in the recent work of Jane Hutton on reciprocal landscapes (2020). This lecture will discuss how the transmogrification of dirt pertains equally to dirt understood as concept and as a material, and how dirt cuts along intersectional lines of gender, class, and race. In conclusion, I hope to open up the discussion to new methodological directions that a dirty theory might invite.Architectural theorist and philosopher, writer and critic, Hélène Frichot is Professor of Architecture and Philosophy, and Director of the Bachelor of Design, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning University of Melbourne, Australia. She is Guest Professor, and the former Director of Critical Studies in Architecture, School of Architecture, KTH Stockholm, Sweden. Her recent publications include Dirty Theory: Troubling Architecture (AADR 2019) and Creative Ecologies: Theorizing the Practice of Architecture (Bloomsbury 2018).The lecture is part of the talk series MY EARTH within the core course Architecture of Territory: Territorial Design in Histories, Theories, and Projects.CONCEPT AND REALISATIONChair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica TopalovićDr. Charlotte Malterre-BarthesMetaxia MarkakiDr. Gyler MydytiDr. Nazlı Tümerdem VIDEO EDITINGQianer ZhuGRAPHIC DESIGNGoda BudvytyteBOOK BINDINGMichiel GiebenThis lecture series sets up an agenda for widening the disciplinary field of architecture and urbanism from their focus on the city, or the urban in the narrow sense, to wider territorial scales, which correspond to the increasing scales of contemporary urbanisation. It discusses the concepts of territory and urbanisation, and their implications for the work of architects and urbanists.MY EARTHWithin the program, five guest speakers are invited to open up perspectives on territory as Earth and the manifold meanings it embodies: Earth as a living world, a world-system, earth as soil, as land, as field, and even as dirt. By looking at the Earth and its ecologies, the guest speakers will propose novel and urgent approaches to territory and urbanisation: from “Gaia-graphy” of Earth’s critical zones, and emergence of urban soil mapping as tool in urban design, to working with “dirt” in order to develop an ethics of care and maintenance for precarious environments.The course will enable students to critically discuss concepts of territory and urbanisation. It will invite students to revisit the history of architects’ work engaging with the problematic of urbanising territories and territorial organisation. The goal is to motivate and equip students to engage with territory in the present day and age, by setting out our contemporary urban agenda. The lectures are animated by a series of visual and conceptual exercises, usually on A4 sheets of paper. All original student contributions will be collected and bound together, creating a unique book-object. Some of the exercises are graded and count as proof of completion.
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes - SELF-REPAIR FOR A BROKEN DISCIPLINE Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2023-10-02 | Charlotte Malterre-Barthes in conversation with Maria Conen and Mio Tsuneyama22.05.2023SELF-REPAIR FOR A BROKEN DISCIPLINEFrom housing redistribution to re-inviting value generation, from anti-extractive measures to profound structural changes, from reinventing design processes and revolutionising construction protocols, from curricula reforms to purging the exploitative culture of the office, from respecting soil to embracing reuse and dismantling, an entire rewiring of architecture and planning disciplines lay ahead if these are to be serious about tackling the multiple crises. Somewhere between a thought experiment and a call for action, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes will discuss the initiative of A Moratorium on New Construction as a possible self-repairing tactic for a broken discipline.Charlotte Malterre-Barthes is an architect, urban designer, and Assistant Professor of Architectural and Urban Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (ENAC-EPFL). Most recently Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Malterre-Barthes’ interests are related to urgent aspects of contemporary urbanisation, material extraction, climate emergency, and ecological/social justice. In 2020, she started the initiative “A Moratorium on New Construction,” interrogating current development protocols. A founding member of the Parity Group (Prix Meret Oppenheim 2023) and of the Parity Front, activist networks dedicated to equality in architecture, Malterre-Barthes holds a Ph.D. from ETH Zurich on the political economy of commodities in the built environment. She is the co-author of prize-winning books Migrant Marseille: Architectures of Social Segregation and Urban Inclusivity (2020), Eileen Gray: A House under the Sun (2019), Some Haunted Spaces in Singapore (2018), and Housing Cairo: The Informal Response (2016), among others.The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—Urbanism in a Broken World: REPAIR.CONCEPT AND REALISATIONChair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica TopalovićDr. Nazlı Tümerdem Dr. Marija MarićJakob WalterJan ZimmermannVIDEO RECORDING AND EDITINGQianer ZhuGRAPHIC DESIGNGoda BudvytyteSESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on agriculture, the upcoming series will draw upon relationships of care and reciprocity with soil and biodiversity from the past and present, to help move beyond consumerist techno-fixes, and toward more self-sufficient and ecological land practices. Through a series of debates with invited guests, the seminar will explore the critical agrarian questions emerging under 21st-century (extended) urbanisation. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents.Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/Courses/Electives/FS23-Urbanism-In-A-Broken-World
Marjetica Potrč - THE PERSONHOOD OF NATURE Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2023-10-02 | Marjetica Potrč in conversation with Nitin Bathla, Santiago del Hierro, Laura Turley, Anna Wienhues, and special guests15.05.2023THE PERSONHOOD OF NATUREThe 2021 referendum on water rights in Slovenia pointed to a shift in attitudes towards nature in contemporary culture: from a society of owners to a society of caretakers. In the eyes of a caretaker, a river is not an object but a subject. As a subject, its rights will eventually be recognized by law, which, no longer human-centred, will acknowledge the agency of nature. Who, then, is a river as a person, and what is our dialogue with it? Can a river own itself? What does a river want? Marjetica Potrč explored these issues in a project for the 23rd Sydney Biennale (2022), in which she collaborated with the Wiradjuri elder Ray Woods, a caretaker of the Lachlan River in New South Wales. She will discuss Woods’s knowledge and practices and their similarity to positions taken by today’s environmentalists.Marjetica Potrč is an artist and architect based in Ljubljana. Her multidisciplinary practice merges art, architecture, ecology and anthropology. From 2011 to 2018, she was a professor of social practice at the University of Fine Arts/HFBK in Hamburg. Her work emphasises individual and community empowerment, problem-solving tools, and strategies for the future that transcend neoliberal agreement. A recent project at the 23rd Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2022), in which she collaborated with the Wiradjuri elder Ray Woods, focused on the rights of Nature.The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—Urbanism in a Broken World: REPAIR.CONCEPT AND REALISATIONChair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica TopalovićDr. Nazlı Tümerdem Dr. Marija MarićJakob WalterJan ZimmermannVIDEO RECORDING AND EDITINGQianer ZhuGRAPHIC DESIGNGoda BudvytyteSESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on agriculture, the upcoming series will draw upon relationships of care and reciprocity with soil and biodiversity from the past and present, to help move beyond consumerist techno-fixes, and toward more self-sufficient and ecological land practices. Through a series of debates with invited guests, the seminar will explore the critical agrarian questions emerging under 21st-century (extended) urbanisation. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents.Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/Courses/Electives/FS23-Urbanism-In-A-Broken-World
Silke Langenberg with Yves Ebnöther and Sara Zeller - COMMITMENT TO REPAIR Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2023-10-02 | Silke Langenberg with Yves Ebnöther and Sara Zeller, a conversation24.04.2023COMMITMENT TO REPAIRRepair is now on everyone’s lips—as an act, a method, an agent of change, a solution. The recent publications Upgrade: Making Things Better and the ARCH+ issue The Great Repair, as well as the ongoing exhibition Repair Revolution! at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich communicate the different approaches to repair and reflect on our habits of production and consumption as a society. But are we truly “committed to repair?” Do we know what that commitment entails? How can we transform from a society, a profession, or an economy, which considers the new as “the highest good,” to one, which demands “the right to repair?”Silke Langenberg is full professor for Construction Heritage and Preservation at ETH Zurich. Her chair is in the Institute for Preservation and Construction History as well as the Institute for Technology in Architecture. From 2014 until 2020, she was a professor for design in existing contexts, preservation, and building research at the Munich University of Applied Sciences. She studied architecture and holds a PhD in engineering sciences. Her research focuses on the rationalization of building processes as well as the development, repair, and long-term conservation of serially, industrially, and digitally manufactured constructions.Yves Ebnöther is a Swiss industrial designer, researcher, and lecturer. He explores the potential of computer-controlled fabrication processes for the design and production of conceptual objects, which were acquired internationally by museums and collections. As a founding member of FabLab Zurich and a full professor for Computer-Generated Object Design at NurembergInstitute of Technology, he worked on the development, durability, and repairability of various products using digital fabrication. Since 2021, he teaches digital technologies in design at ZHAW School of Architecture, Design and Civil Engineering and works as independent designer in Zurich.Sara Zeller is a curator at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich. She studied art history in Zurich, Berlin, and Bern. From 2016 to 2021, she completed a PhD as part of the SNF-Sinergia project Swiss Graphic Design and Typography Revisited. In addition, she worked as a freelance curator, author, and lecturer. She is coeditor of Tempting Terms: Swiss Graphic Design Histories (2021).The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—Urbanism in a Broken World: REPAIR.CONCEPT AND REALISATIONChair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica TopalovićDr. Nazlı Tümerdem Dr. Marija MarićJakob WalterJan ZimmermannVIDEO RECORDING AND EDITINGQianer ZhuGRAPHIC DESIGNGoda BudvytyteSESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on agriculture, the upcoming series will draw upon relationships of care and reciprocity with soil and biodiversity from the past and present, to help move beyond consumerist techno-fixes, and toward more self-sufficient and ecological land practices. Through a series of debates with invited guests, the seminar will explore the critical agrarian questions emerging under 21st-century (extended) urbanisation. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents.Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/Courses/Electives/FS23-Urbanism-In-A-Broken-World
Jake Arnfield for UVW-SAW - DISMANTLING THE ARCHITECTURAL OFFICE Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2023-10-02 | Jake Arnfield for Section of Architectural Workers (UVW-SAW) in conversation with Lukas Fink (arge.co), Milena Buchwalder (arge.co), and Non-Swiss Architects03.04.2023DISMANTLING THE ARCHITECTURAL OFFICEArchitecture, as practised under neoliberalism, is an instrument of erasure and exploitation. Its function is to inflate the financial value of land to extract profit in service of a powerful minority. The architectural office is itself one frontier of exploitation. Architectural workers are subjected to endless overtime, paid asymmetrically based on so-called “countries of origin,” and hierarchically classified and subordinated to the director. The impact of architecture imposed in the city, and its ready exploitation of its own workforce is not a coincidence but intimately connected to a wider structure of domination. Capitalism deliberately drums up hostility between its subjects to maintain its power. Trade union organising means forging connections across and between individual experiences. And so, to challenge its hegemony, United Voices of the World—Section of Architectural Workers (UVW-SAW) presents its strategy for how architectural workers can transform architectural work: ally and coordinate against its acting leaders, and dismantle it together.United Voices of the World—Section of Architectural Workers (UVW-SAW), is a newly-formed grassroots trade union for architectural workers in the U.K. SAW collectively take action and fight against the negative impacts of architectural work on workers, communities, and the environment.Jake Arnfield (he/him) is an elected workplace organiser for UVW-SAW, and sits on the Coordinating Group. He focuses on increasing the participation of workers in the union, and organising them to take coordinated collective action.The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—Urbanism in a Broken World: REPAIR.CONCEPT AND REALISATIONChair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica TopalovićDr. Nazlı Tümerdem Dr. Marija MarićJakob WalterJan ZimmermannVIDEO RECORDING AND EDITINGQianer ZhuGRAPHIC DESIGNGoda BudvytyteSESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on agriculture, the upcoming series will draw upon relationships of care and reciprocity with soil and biodiversity from the past and present, to help move beyond consumerist techno-fixes, and toward more self-sufficient and ecological land practices. Through a series of debates with invited guests, the seminar will explore the critical agrarian questions emerging under 21st-century (extended) urbanisation. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents.Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/Courses/Electives/FS23-Urbanism-In-A-Broken-World
Ana Miljački - COLLECTIVE REPAIR Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2023-10-02 | Ana Miljački in conversation with Freek Persyn, Grégoire Farquet and Unmasking Space13.02.2023COLLECTIVE REPAIRCollective Repair presents examples of pedagogical and curatorial work produced from within the framework of the Critical Broadcasting Lab at MIT. These include the Collective Architecture Studio series aimed at actively reconfiguring the way that architectural authorship flows, is understood, and is addressed in the context of academia, while simultaneously considering ways that collective ownership has historically, and might yet shape architectural outcomes.Ana Miljački is a critic, curator and professor of Architecture at MIT, where she teaches history, theory and design. She is the author of The Optimum Imperative: Czech Architecture for the Socialist Lifestyle 1938-1968 (Routledge, 2017), and has recently coedited LOG 54: Coauthoring with Ann Lui, and JAE 76:2, Pedagogies for a Broken World, with Igor Marjanović and Jay Cephas. Since 2018 she has been directing the Critical Broadcasting Lab at MIT.The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—Urbanism in a Broken World: REPAIR.CONCEPT AND REALISATIONChair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica TopalovićDr. Nazlı Tümerdem Dr. Marija MarićJakob WalterJan ZimmermannVIDEO RECORDING AND EDITINGQianer ZhuGRAPHIC DESIGNGoda BudvytyteSESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on agriculture, the upcoming series will draw upon relationships of care and reciprocity with soil and biodiversity from the past and present, to help move beyond consumerist techno-fixes, and toward more self-sufficient and ecological land practices. Through a series of debates with invited guests, the seminar will explore the critical agrarian questions emerging under 21st-century (extended) urbanisation. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents.Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/Courses/Electives/FS23-Urbanism-In-A-Broken-World
ARCH+ #250 Editors - THE GREAT REPAIR: LAUNCH Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2023-10-02 | 27.02.2023ARCH+ #250 Editors in conversation with Marc Angélil, Silke Langenberg, Momoyo Kaijima, Bas Princen and other guests - THE GREAT REPAIR: LAUNCH Capitalist modernity, with its emphasis on innovation, growth, and progress, its economic system based on consumerism, wasteful use, and profligacy, has led to a ruthless exploitation of humans and nature. Architecture has played no small part in this, as the statistics on greenhouse gas emissions and construction and demolition waste prove. As a counterstrategy to capitalism’s creative destruction, The Great Repair advocates a focus on repair, in which nurturing, maintenance and repair become the key strategies for action. The project aims to reorient the foundations of our systems of thought and economy toward economies of repair and care, in order for the economy to be re embedded in society, and the latter for its part in the natural environment.The editorial team with Christian Hiller, Felix Hofmann, Markus Krieger, Anh-Linh Ngo Florian Hertweck, Milica Topalović, and Nazlı Tümerdem will be in conversation with collaborators, contributors and critics Marc Angélil, Silke Langenberg, Momoyo Kaijima, and Bas Princen.The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—Urbanism in a Broken World: REPAIR.CONCEPT AND REALISATIONChair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica TopalovićDr. Nazlı Tümerdem Dr. Marija MarićJakob WalterJan ZimmermannVIDEO RECORDING AND EDITINGQianer ZhuGRAPHIC DESIGNGoda BudvytyteSESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on agriculture, the upcoming series will draw upon relationships of care and reciprocity with soil and biodiversity from the past and present, to help move beyond consumerist techno-fixes, and toward more self-sufficient and ecological land practices. Through a series of debates with invited guests, the seminar will explore the critical agrarian questions emerging under 21st-century (extended) urbanisation. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents.Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/Courses/Electives/FS23-Urbanism-In-A-Broken-World
Eva Pfannes - ENERGY MATTERS Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2023-09-20 | 24.11.2023Eva Pfannes - ENERGY MATTERSThe Netherlands is undergoing a major transition, aiming to shift 1.5 million homes away from dependency on gas within the next decade. OOZE was commissioned by the IABR to develop a Local Energy Action Plan (LEAP) to implement the energy transition at district level in the municipality of Rotterdam while also contributing to the city’s resilience and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Questions that led to the LEAP are fundamental: How do we literally leap from where we are now to where we need to be in the future? How can we transition from living with a massive individual footprint of 16 tonnes CO2 per year to living in a carbon neutral world by 2050 at the very latest? Answers to such questions surely do not lie in the domains of science and technology alone. They also don’t rest with individual households; their contribution to the reduction of carbon emissions can in a best case be 18 % only. Actually, answers cannot be given by any individual person, country or institution, as the energy transition is a shared problem that has to be addressed collaboratively and integrally. Any LEAP should use the energy transition to address climate mitigation and climate adaptation and more equal inclusive society and the SDGs.To find answers to the above questions, the LEAP investigated four concrete cases at a concrete locations with a known group of actors at a given moment in time. From exploring this concrete cases, a number of generally applicable principles were derived. The overarching principle is the idea that restoring connections between nature and natural capacities, the city, and its inhabitants is a basis for minimising the human footprint on the natural world. Within this wider context, principles are custom-tailored to foster paradigmatic change in energy systems and across any boundaries.Eva Pfannes is an architect and urban designer working in Europe, India and Brazil. She co-founded the international design practice OOZE in 2003 with Sylvain Hartenberg, working across scales, from regional strategies to architecture and research, combining an elaborate understanding of natural, ecological processes, with technological expertise and deep insights in to the social-cultural behaviour of users of the built environment. The cyclic closed-loop processes found in nature are the foundation for each intervention and integrate the human scale within a comprehensive urban strategy. Eva was co-curator of the ninth edition of the International Architecture Biennial Rotterdam (IABR), DOWN TO EARTH (2020–2021) and the lead designer of the IABR–Atelier Rotterdam III. She is the team lead for the City of 1000 Tanks project in Chennai, part of the global Water as Leverage program of the Dutch Government.Her expertise covers urban, participatory and climate resilience strategies including Nature Based Solutions and developing multi system models with an interdisciplinary team. The lecture is part of the talk series MY ENERGY within the core course Architecture of Territory: Territorial Design in Histories, Theories and Projects.CONCEPT AND REALISATIONChair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica TopalovićDr. Nazlı Tümerdem VIDEO RECORDING AND EDITINGQianer ZhuGRAPHIC DESIGNGoda BudvytyteBOOK BINDINGMichiel GiebenThis lecture series sets up an agenda for widening the disciplinary field of architecture and urbanism from their focus on the city, or the urban in the narrow sense, to wider territorial scales, which correspond to the increasing scales of contemporary urbanisation. It discusses the concepts of territory and urbanisation, and their implications for the work of architects and urbanists.MY ENERGYWithin the theme My Energy, the four guest speakers engaged in fields ranging from energy humanities and feminist political ecology to urban history and urban design, will approach the notions such as energy transition, decarbonisation, genealogy of energy, and urban microclimates.The course will enable students to critically discuss concepts of territory and urbanisation. It will invite students to revisit the history of architects’ work engaging with the problematic of urbanising territories and territorial organisation. The goal is to motivate and equip students to engage with territory in the present day and age, by setting out our contemporary urban agenda. The lectures are animated by a series of visual and conceptual exercises, usually on A4 sheets of paper. All original student contributions will be collected and bound together, creating a unique book-object. Some of the exercises are graded and count as proof of completion.
Gökçe Günel - SPACESHIP IN THE DESERT: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2023-09-20 | 20.10.2022Gökçe Günel - SPACESHIP IN THE DESERT: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu DhabiIn 2006, Abu Dhabi launched an ambitious project to construct the world’s first “zero-carbon” city: Masdar City. This talk investigates the construction of renewable energy and clean technology infrastructures in oil-rich Abu Dhabi, as the era of abundant oil supplies slowly comes to an end. It explores the production of Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, and shows how the Masdar City project was instrumental for economic diversification in the United Arab Emirates, helping generate a green brand image. At the same time, it demonstrates how the renewable energy and clean technology infrastructures of Masdar City fueled an aspiration for the manageability of ecological problems, where business models and design solutions would contain and resolve climate change without surrendering hope for increasing productivity and technological complexity. The talk responds to the debates on whether Masdar City and its multiple infrastructures were successes or failures, and examines the potential of evolving projects.Gökçe Günel is Associate Professor in Anthropology at Rice University. Her first book Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (Duke University Press, 2019) focuses on the construction of renewable energy and clean technology infrastructures in the United Arab Emirates, more specifically concentrating on the Masdar City project. Her articles have been published in Public Culture, Anthropological Quarterly, Environment and Planning: D, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Log, e-flux, The ARPA Journal, Avery Review, The Fibreculture Journal, and PoLAR among others. Prior to Rice, she taught at Columbia University and the University of Arizona.The lecture is part of the talk series MY ENERGY within the core course Architecture of Territory: Territorial Design in Histories, Theories and Projects.CONCEPT AND REALISATIONChair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica TopalovićDr. Nazlı Tümerdem VIDEO RECORDING AND EDITINGQianer ZhuGRAPHIC DESIGNGoda BudvytyteBOOK BINDINGMichiel GiebenThis lecture series sets up an agenda for widening the disciplinary field of architecture and urbanism from their focus on the city, or the urban in the narrow sense, to wider territorial scales, which correspond to the increasing scales of contemporary urbanisation. It discusses the concepts of territory and urbanisation, and their implications for the work of architects and urbanists.MY ENERGYWithin the theme My Energy, the four guest speakers engaged in fields ranging from energy humanities and feminist political ecology to urban history and urban design, will approach the notions such as energy transition, decarbonisation, genealogy of energy, and urban microclimates.The course will enable students to critically discuss concepts of territory and urbanisation. It will invite students to revisit the history of architects’ work engaging with the problematic of urbanising territories and territorial organisation. The goal is to motivate and equip students to engage with territory in the present day and age, by setting out our contemporary urban agenda. The lectures are animated by a series of visual and conceptual exercises, usually on A4 sheets of paper. All original student contributions will be collected and bound together, creating a unique book-object. Some of the exercises are graded and count as proof of completion.
Sascha Roesler - EXPLORING ENERGY ECOLOGIES Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2023-09-20 | 13.10.2022Sascha Roesler - EXPLORING ENERGY ECOLOGIES Since the late 1960s, landscape architects such as Ian McHarg, Anne Whiston Spirn and Michael Hough, as well as urban planners such as Ralph Knowles and Vladimir Matus were increasingly aware of the urban dimensions of energy. Hough introduced the notion of an “energy landscape,” pioneering “an ecological view that encompasses the total urban landscape.” Energy was addressed not only as a problem of infrastructure and supply, but, moreover, as a question of permanent exchange within the existing urban environment, involving ambient energy sources such as winds and the sun. The perspective of the individual building was abandoned in favour of a more cooperative view of the city.Today, the notion of “energy ecology” turns out to be of fundamental significance for rethinking architecture’s relation to energy infrastructures. While in the last few decades the discipline of architecture was mainly concerned with the self-sufficiency of individual buildings, the notion of energy ecology emphasises the need for a new urban scale for saving and producing energy, integrating technological systems, natural processes, and built structures. In my talk, critical components of future energy landscapes shall be discussed, based on an archaeological exploration of ecological urbanism of the recent past. Referring to the writings of Anne Whiston Spirn, the historian of technology Thomas Hughes speaks of the “overlapping natural and human-built systems found in cities”. Urban energy ecologies can be conceived as three-dimensional, multilayered “palimpsests” (André Corboz) in which large-scale infrastructures and natural forces intersect.Sascha Roesler is an architect and theorist, working at the intersection of architecture, ethnography, and science and technology studies. He is the Associate Professor for Theory of Urbanization and Urban Environments at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, Switzerland (Università della Svizzera Italiana). Roesler has published widely on issues of global architecture, sustainability, and environmental technologies. His books include Weltkonstruktion (Gebr. Mann, 2013, 2021), a global history of architectural ethnography, and Habitat Marocain Documents (Park Books, 2015), a volume on the transformation of a colonial settlement in Casablanca. The latter was awarded the DAM architectural book award in 2016 as one of the year’s ten outstanding architectural publications. Most recently Roesler launched a new international series entitled KLIMA POLIS, published by Birkhäuser. The two first volumes of this book series aim at rethinking climate control—a key concern of the discipline of architecture—through the lens of urban climate phenomena. These two books entitled City, Climate, and Architecture (Birkhäuser 2022) and Coping with Urban Climates (Birkhäuser 2022) question whether the energy-source supply of urban architecture can still be taken as a private matter.The lecture is part of the talk series MY ENERGY within the core course Architecture of Territory: Territorial Design in Histories, Theories and Projects.CONCEPT AND REALISATIONChair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica TopalovićDr. Nazlı Tümerdem VIDEO RECORDING AND EDITINGQianer ZhuGRAPHIC DESIGNGoda BudvytyteBOOK BINDINGMichiel GiebenThis lecture series sets up an agenda for widening the disciplinary field of architecture and urbanism from their focus on the city, or the urban in the narrow sense, to wider territorial scales, which correspond to the increasing scales of contemporary urbanisation. It discusses the concepts of territory and urbanisation, and their implications for the work of architects and urbanists.MY ENERGYWithin the theme My Energy, the four guest speakers engaged in fields ranging from energy humanities and feminist political ecology to urban history and urban design, will approach the notions such as energy transition, decarbonisation, genealogy of energy, and urban microclimates.The course will enable students to critically discuss concepts of territory and urbanisation. It will invite students to revisit the history of architects’ work engaging with the problematic of urbanising territories and territorial organisation. The goal is to motivate and equip students to engage with territory in the present day and age, by setting out our contemporary urban agenda. The lectures are animated by a series of visual and conceptual exercises, usually on A4 sheets of paper. All original student contributions will be collected and bound together, creating a unique book-object. Some of the exercises are graded and count as proof of completion.
Maya & Reuben Fowkes - POTENTIAL AGRARIANISMS: Pluralised Histories and Reparative Futures Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2023-09-20 | Maja and Reuben Fowkes in conversation with Santiago del Hierro, and Ursula Biemann16.05.2022POTENTIAL AGRARIANISMS: Pluralised Histories and Reparative FuturesThe exhibition Potential Agrarianisms set out to rethink the human and non-human histories, social and environmental relations, and ecological prospects of the terrains of the countryside, the rural, agriculture, and the land. The diverse associations, entwinements and urgencies of these intersecting terminologies come together in the expansive notion of agrarianisms. In this presentation we will discuss the multiplicity of aesthetic, geographical, and political positions from which the art practices brought together in the show engaged with and activated the ecological potentialities of the physical and conceptual fields of the agrarian. How might the uncovering of other social and environmental, but also legal and political histories of the land contribute to debates over the need to diversify, detoxify, and de-intensify agriculture? What can be salvaged from the chronicles of peasant rebellions and the legacy of agrarianism as a mid-century political project for today’s struggles against corporate power and populism in the countryside? To what extent do non-western, traditional and alternative rural cultures provide models and knowledges for the restoration of caring and reciprocal relationships with the natural world?Dr Maja Fowkes and Dr Reuben Fowkes are founders of the Translocal Institute for Contemporary Art and co-directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London. Their publications include Art and Climate Change (Thames & Hudson, 2022), Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2020) and Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar (Sternberg Press, 2021). Their curatorial projects include the exhibition Potential Agrarianisms at Kunsthalle Bratislava, the multi-year programs of the Anthropocene Reading Room and the Danube River School, and the group shows Walking without Footprints, Like a Bird and Loophole to Happiness. www.translocal.orgThe event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—Urbanism & the Countryside.CONCEPT AND REALISATIONChair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica TopalovićDr. Nitin Bathla Dr. Nazlı Tümerdem Hans HortigVIDEO RECORDING AND EDITINGAymane Hayyene FilaliGRAPHIC DESIGNGoda BudvytyteSESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on agriculture, the upcoming series will draw upon relationships of care and reciprocity with soil and biodiversity from the past and present, to help move beyond consumerist techno-fixes, and toward more self-sufficient and ecological land practices. Through a series of debates with invited guests, the seminar will explore the critical agrarian questions emerging under 21st-century (extended) urbanisation. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents.Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/Courses/Electives/FS22-Urbanism-And-The-Countryside_CHAPTERS_00:00 Intro12:23 Maja and Reuben Fowkes' presentation1:01:02 Milica Topalović starts the discussion1:07:33 Ursula Biemann1:13:09 Santiago del Hierro1:28:36 Nitin Bathla1:35:13 Milica Topalović1:39:22 Ursula Biemann1:47:55 Nazlı Tümerdem1:54:00 Questions from the audience2:01:13 Milica Topalović closes the session
Sahar Qawsami of SAKIYA - ART/SCIENCE/AGRICULTURE: Pedagogies of the Commons Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2023-09-20 | Sahar Qawsami of Sakiya in conversation with Adam Jasper, Stefanie Knobel, and Federico LuisettiSakiya is a progressive academy, a field for experimental knowledge production and sharing in Ein Qiniya, a village 7 kilometres west of Ramallah, Palestine. By grafting local agrarian traditions of self-sufficiency with contemporary arts and ecological practices, Sakiya seek to create a new narrative around our relationship to land, knowledge, and the commons. Within the framework of a cross disciplinary residency program, marginalised cultural actors, such as farmers and crafts/small industry initiatives, assume a prominent role alongside artists and scholars, challenging the demographic divide that characterises cultural production and consumption. Through self-sufficient practices, agriculture connects with contemporary arts and sciences for a more sustainable and resilient future. These practices are not new but are continuously and increasingly threatened by the forces of colonisation and neoliberal modes of production. Liberation, we at Sakiya believe, comes from a connection and re-framing of an ancient relationship to the land.SAHAR QAWASMI is an architect restorer and co‐founder of Sakiya – Art | Science | Agriculture with Nida Sinnokrot. She is dedicated to protecting, (re)claiming, (re)building, and (re)imagining different forms of common structures and infrastructures, challenging and reconfiguring private ownership and isolating social practices. She engages with collective indigenous, environmental, and feminist methodologies of learning and unlearning to cultivate space for a wider ecology of knowledge.The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—Urbanism & the Countryside.CONCEPT AND REALISATIONChair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica TopalovićDr. Nitin Bathla Dr. Nazlı Tümerdem Hans HortigVIDEO RECORDING AND EDITINGAymane Hayyene FilaliGRAPHIC DESIGNGoda BudvytyteSESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on agriculture, the upcoming series will draw upon relationships of care and reciprocity with soil and biodiversity from the past and present, to help move beyond consumerist techno-fixes, and toward more self-sufficient and ecological land practices. Through a series of debates with invited guests, the seminar will explore the critical agrarian questions emerging under 21st-century (extended) urbanisation. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents.Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/Courses/Electives/FS22-Urbanism-And-The-Countryside_CHAPTERS_00:00 Intro11:05 Sahar Qawsami's presentation1:05:35 Stefanie Knobel1:10:35 Federico Luisetti1:16:52 Milica Topalović1:23:45 Questions from the audience1:42:20 Adam Jasper1:51:47 Nazlı Tümerdem 2:05:10 Milica Topalović closes the session
Christopher Roth - THE SEASONS IN QUINCY: Four Portraits of John Berger Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2023-09-20 | Film screening with director Christopher Roth, followed by a conversation with Klearjos Papanicolaou and Susanne Hefti02.05.2022THE SEASONS IN QUINCY: Four Portraits of John BergerThe Seasons in Quincy is the result of a five-year project that gives a portrait of the intellectual and storyteller John Berger. In 1973, Berger abandoned the metropolis to live in the tiny Alpine village of Quincy. The four-part film examines different aspects of his life in this remote village while also combining ideas and motifs from the writer’s own work. Each film was created as an individual work of art but in the end combine to make this feature film. In this session, we welcome Christopher Roth, the director of “Spring,” the part that contextualises Berger’s seminal writing on animals in the local farming culture.Christopher Roth is a film director, artist, and television producer. In the summer of 2022, So Long Daddy. See You in Hell will be launched. A fictional feature film he made with Jeanne Tremsal about her youth in a commune in the 1980s. Jana McKinnon and Clemens Schick play the lead roles. Roth was one of the curators of the German Pavilion at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, looking back from the year 2038 at how we barely managed to get a grip on the big problems. Over 4 hours of film have emerged from the New Serenity period. In 2018, Roth co-launched space-time.tv a cooperative television platform with now 4 channels. The same year marked the premiere of Architecting after Politics, the third film with architects Brandlhuber+ after The Property Drama (Chicago Biennale 2017) and its predecessor Legislating Architecture (Venice Biennale 2016). Roth made Hyperstition with Armen Avanessian and The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger with Colin McCabe and Tilda Swinton (Berlinale, 2016). Roth’s film Baader was awarded the Silver Bear for “New Perspectives in Cinema” at the 2002 Berlinale. Christopher Roth shows at Esther Schipper Gallery.The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—Urbanism & the Countryside.CONCEPT AND REALISATIONChair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica TopalovićDr. Nitin Bathla Dr. Nazlı Tümerdem Hans HortigVIDEO RECORDING AND EDITINGAymane Hayyene FilaliGRAPHIC DESIGNGoda BudvytyteSESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on agriculture, the upcoming series will draw upon relationships of care and reciprocity with soil and biodiversity from the past and present, to help move beyond consumerist techno-fixes, and toward more self-sufficient and ecological land practices. Through a series of debates with invited guests, the seminar will explore the critical agrarian questions emerging under 21st-century (extended) urbanisation. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents.Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/Courses/Electives/FS22-Urbanism-And-The-Countryside_CHAPTERS_00:00 Intro11:03 Milica Topalović starts the discussion12:19 Christopher Roth responds20:00 Susanne Hefti26:18 Klearjos Papanicolaou36:20 Milica Topalović46:59 Klearjos Papanicolaou52:38 Susanne Hefti55:30 Milica Topalović closes the session
Tamar Novick - REPRODUCING PLENTY Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2023-09-20 | Tamar Novick in conversation with William Davis and Hollyamber Kennedy28.03.2022REPRODUCING PLENTY: Settler Colonialism, Agriculture, and Fertility Science in Palestine-IsraelFrom the early days of European intervention and colonial settlement in Palestine - cutting across the late Ottoman, British, and Israeli rules - travellers, state officials, and settlers expected the land to be plentiful, a “land flowing with milk and honey.” By way of fulfilling such expectations, the configuration of the environment and more-than-human bodies was intertwined with political governance. Focusing on the 1920s-1960s, the talk scrutinises the problem of infertility, which threatened the existence of the entire settlement project. It focuses on a group of Jewish settler gynaecologists and veterinarians and their collaboration with farmers, and examines their attempt to deal with the reproductive limitations of the human and animal body and their efforts to realize plenty. TAMAR NOVICK is trained as a historian of science, and writes about agriculture, technology, animals, bodily waste, and fertility research in Palestine-Israel. She holds a PhD from the History and Sociology of Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Novick is the author of Milk & Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land (MIT Press: forthcoming). She is currently a Senior Research Scholar at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where she leads a working-group on animals and knowledge construction titled “Out of Place, Out of Time.”The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—Urbanism & the Countryside.CONCEPT AND REALISATIONChair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica TopalovićDr. Nitin Bathla Dr. Nazlı Tümerdem Hans HortigVIDEO RECORDING AND EDITINGAymane Hayyene FilaliGRAPHIC DESIGNGoda BudvytyteSESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on agriculture, the upcoming series will draw upon relationships of care and reciprocity with soil and biodiversity from the past and present, to help move beyond consumerist techno-fixes, and toward more self-sufficient and ecological land practices. Through a series of debates with invited guests, the seminar will explore the critical agrarian questions emerging under 21st-century (extended) urbanisation. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents.Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/Courses/Electives/FS22-Urbanism-And-The-Countryside_CHAPTERS_00:00 Intro7:20 Tamar Novick's presentation1:01:05 Milica Topalović starts the discussion1:02:25 Hollyamber Kennedy1:10:37 William Davis1:17:23 Hans Hortig1:21:06 Discussion with the audience1:35:35 Debjani Bhattacharyya1:45:38 Milica Topalović closes the session
Lenora Ditzler - IMAGINATIONS FOR THE FUTURE OF INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2023-09-20 | Lenora Ditzler in conversation with Johanna Jacobi and Office of Living Things14.03.2022IMAGINATIONS FOR THE FUTURE OF INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTUREWhat nature-positive alternatives to large-scale industrial cropping systems can we imagine? Do they work, according to production and sustainability targets? Are they acceptable, attractive, and feasible for the farmers who will implement them? And what kinds of technological support might farmers and farm workers need to make these alternatives viable? We’ll look together at examples of both currently implementable and future-oriented imaginations for how industrial cropping systems may be redesigned, and explore the agro-ecological and socio-technological opportunities, challenges, and questions that each imagination brings up.LENORA DITZLER is an agricultural systems scientist working on a PhD in the Farming Systems Ecology group at Wageningen University in The Netherlands. She is trained in agroecology, whole-farm modelling, systems analysis, and visual arts. Her research explores current entry points and design frontiers for the transition towards more diverse and nature-positive open-field crop production systems in intensive and industrialised farming contexts. Recurrent themes in Lenora’s work include questioning the philosophical and historical underpinnings of the monoculture mindset, investigating the ecological and agronomic potential of biodiversity-based farming systems, connecting practitioners from across disciplines in research-through-design, and communicating scientific findings in both academic and creative venues.The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—Urbanism & the Countryside.CONCEPT AND REALISATIONChair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica TopalovićDr. Nitin Bathla Dr. Nazlı Tümerdem Hans HortigVIDEO RECORDING AND EDITINGAymane Hayyene FilaliGRAPHIC DESIGNGoda BudvytyteSESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on agriculture, the upcoming series will draw upon relationships of care and reciprocity with soil and biodiversity from the past and present, to help move beyond consumerist techno-fixes, and toward more self-sufficient and ecological land practices. Through a series of debates with invited guests, the seminar will explore the critical agrarian questions emerging under 21st-century (extended) urbanisation. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents.Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/Courses/Electives/FS22-Urbanism-And-The-Countryside_CHAPTERS_00:00 Intro7:45 Lenora Ditzler's presentation45:14 Milica Topalović starts the discussion48:23 Lenora Ditzler responds53:00 Discussion with the respondents1:22:47 Discussion with the audience1:53:30 Milica Topalović closes the session
Raj Patel - WHEN, WHERE, AND WITH WHOM IS THE ANTHROPOCENE? Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2023-09-20 | Raj Patel in conversation with Christian Schmid, Debjani Bhattacharyya, and Neil Brenner28.02.2022WHEN, WHERE, AND WITH WHOM IS THE ANTHROPOCENE?The countryside is a term that deserves to be troubled. By using the tools of world-ecology, it's possible to understand non-urban land as profoundly implicated in multiple urban projects, and spatial fixes. Examining Yanomami territory in what is currently northern Brazil and southern Venezuela demonstrates the complex politics of late capitalism that make and unmake this frontier as countryside.RAJ PATEL is an award-winning author, film-maker and academic. He is a Research Professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin. He has degrees from the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cornell University, has worked for the World Bank and WTO, and protested against them around the world. Raj co-taught the 2014 Edible Education class at UC Berkeley with Michael Pollan. In 2016 he was recognised with a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award. He has testified about the causes of the global food crisis to the US, UK and EU governments and is a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems. In addition to scholarly publications in economics, philosophy, politics and public health journals, he regularly writes for The Guardian, and has contributed to the Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Times of India, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Mail on Sunday, and The Observer.The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—Urbanism & the Countryside.CONCEPT AND REALISATIONChair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica TopalovićDr. Nitin Bathla Dr. Nazlı Tümerdem Hans HortigVIDEO RECORDING AND EDITINGAymane Hayyene FilaliGRAPHIC DESIGNGoda BudvytyteSESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on agriculture, the upcoming series will draw upon relationships of care and reciprocity with soil and biodiversity from the past and present, to help move beyond consumerist techno-fixes, and toward more self-sufficient and ecological land practices. Through a series of debates with invited guests, the seminar will explore the critical agrarian questions emerging under 21st-century (extended) urbanisation. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents.Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/Courses/Electives/FS22-Urbanism-And-The-Countryside_CHAPTERS_00:00 Intro10:24 Raj Patel's presentation49:25 Milica Topalović starts the discussion52:24 Debjani Bhattacharyya57:56 Christian Schmid1:08:01 Neil Brenner1:17:09 Raj Patel responds1:17:58 Discussion with the audience1:28:28 Raj Patel responds1:40:10 Discussion with the audience1:46:00 Raj Patel responds1:49:30 Last Comments: Debjani Bhattacharyya1:51:14 Last Comments: Christian Schmid1:57:28 Last Comments: Neil Brenner
ARCHITECTURE OF TERRITORY — Images of Territory Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2022-07-14 | ...
Keller Easterling — MEDIUM DESIGN Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2022-07-06 | ETH Zurich D-ARCHARCHITECTURE OF TERRITORYSESSIONS ON TERRITORY27.11.2019KELLER EASTERLING – MEDIUM DESIGN in conversation with Marc Angélil, Arno Brandlhuber, Charlotte Malterre Barthes and Milica Topalović
Francois Charbonnet — PORTRAITS IV—TERRITORY & POLITICS Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2021-07-26 | Francois Charbonnet in conversation with Daniel NiggliCONCEPT AND REALISATION Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning $Prof. Milica Topalovic & Prof. Marc Angélil, ETH Zürich Department of Architecture The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—URBANISM BEYOND NEOLIBERALISM SESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory within and beyond the neoliberal order. The seminar’s objective is to unravel forces at work in the formation and the perception of the contemporary city, and, as importantly, to spur debates that challenge the status quo. Every intervention by a guest speaker will be followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents. This semester’s series on POWER constitutes the first installment of Sessions on Territory—Urbanism Beyond Neoliberalism. The Sessions on Territory are a collaboration between the professorships of Marc Angelil and Milica Topalovic. Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/projects/sessions-on-territory/27.11.2017 PORTRAITS IV—TERRITORY & POLITICS François Charbonnet with Daniel Niggli In the chapter XVI of his Leviathan – Of Persons, Authors and Things personated (1651), Hobbes defines the person as he « whose words and actions are considered, either as his own or as representing the words and actions of another man […] » accordingly delineating two subcategories : that of the natural person – when the words are his own – and that of the artificial person – when these are representing the words and actions of another ; he further states : « Of persons artificial, some have their words and actions ‘owned’ by those whom they represent. And then the person is the ‘actor’, and he that owns his words and actions is the ‘author’, in which case the actor acts by authority – but is not the author […]. So that by authority is always understood a right of doing any act, and ‘done by authority’, done by commission or license from him whose right it is ».
Andrés Jaque — TRANSMATERIAL POLITICS Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2021-07-26 | CONCEPT AND REALISATION Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning $Prof. Milica Topalovic & Prof. Marc Angélil, ETH Zürich Department of Architecture The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—URBANISM BEYOND NEOLIBERALISM SESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory within and beyond the neoliberal order. The seminar’s objective is to unravel forces at work in the formation and the perception of the contemporary city, and, as importantly, to spur debates that challenge the status quo. Every intervention by a guest speaker will be followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents. This semester’s series on POWER constitutes the first installment of Sessions on Territory—Urbanism Beyond Neoliberalism. The Sessions on Territory are a collaboration between the professorships of Marc Angelil and Milica Topalovic. Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/projects/sessions-on-territory/20.11.2017 TRANSMATERIAL POLITICS Andrés Jaque with Andreas Ruby The sequence started the moment that one of the young boys living in the family farm in Touba decided to emigrate to Madrid. At this point, the family matriarch at the farmhouse in Touba called one of the males living in Madrid, an older cousin of the boy. The cousin did not answer his cell phone but, instead, headed to a phone parlor where he could obtain better rates for international calls. There, he called the family matriarch to learn of the next arrival. He asked her to stress the need for the boy to walk all the way to either an African grocery store or a Senegalese restaurant in the Lavapiés district. The plan succeeded and, several months later, the young boy made his way to the African grocery in Lavapiés where he found people who put him in touch with his relative. He then took a place in a shared apartment with his cousin and four other Mouride men. It is important to consider the nature of the urban composition in which this event developed: not a city but a fragmented transnational assemblage. In this urban constellation, built devices – such as the apartments, mosque, phone parlors, African grocery stores, and Senegalese restaurants in Lavapiés – are activated in the urban scene only by interacting with a number of diverse technologies including cell phones, rugs, speakers, online platforms, and money transfer services. This urbanism is not shaped by the city itself – neither by its grid nor by the volumes and spaces its buildings create– but by an association of diverse devices that interact to produce an interscalar ecosystem of heterogeneous entities. Fragments of this constellation can be found in shared spaces collectively constructed in the minds and books of the Mouride believers. These fragments are connected by interaction and the performativity of urban dynamics. They gain continuity when phone calls are made, money transfers are ordered, and the relatives of recent immigrants are informed of arrivals. The urbanism by which the Mouride family is enacted is not fixed but performative. Such an urbanism challenges the ways we think politics is embodied in architecture.
Jennifer Robinson — TRACES OF THE MORE–THAN–NEOLIBERAL Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2021-07-26 | Jennifer Robinson in conversation with Christian Schmid and Benedikt KorfCONCEPT AND REALISATION Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning Prof. Milica Topalovic & Prof. Marc Angélil, ETH Zürich Department of Architecture The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—URBANISM BEYOND NEOLIBERALISM SESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory within and beyond the neoliberal order. The seminar’s objective is to unravel forces at work in the formation and the perception of the contemporary city, and, as importantly, to spur debates that challenge the status quo. Every intervention by a guest speaker will be followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents. This semester’s series on POWER constitutes the first installment of Sessions on Territory—Urbanism Beyond Neoliberalism. The Sessions on Territory are a collaboration between the professorships of Marc Angelil and Milica Topalovic. Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/projects/sessions-on-territory/13.11.2017 TRACES OF THE MORE–THAN–NEOLIBERAL Jennifer Robinson with Christian Schmid & Benedikt Korf Bringing the more-than-neoliberal into focus requires a move beyond the practice of tracking neoliberal policies and their localisation, observing their transformation and noting that in the process they reinvigorate the global “syndrome” of neoliberalisation. This way, we only ever “see” neoliberalisation. In this paper I will explore how taking a more explicitly comparative approach to tracing connections between places can bring into view elements of urban processes which a policy mobilities perspective notes but doesn’t treat as a basis for wider analytical insights. Thus, important features of urban processes might be viewed as “fellow travellers” or local variation, and assigned to a non-theoretical series of particular observations. Treating connections as a foundation or starting point for comparison can help to build stronger theoretical and political insights concerning a wider range of urban processes.
Arno Brandlhuber & Christopher Roth — THE PROPERTY DRAMA Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2021-07-26 | Arno Brandlhuber & Christopher Roth in in conversation with Patrik Schumacher and Alexander LehnererCONCEPT AND REALISATION Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning Prof. Milica Topalovic & Prof. Marc Angélil, ETH Zürich Department of Architecture The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—URBANISM BEYOND NEOLIBERALISM SESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory within and beyond the neoliberal order. The seminar’s objective is to unravel forces at work in the formation and the perception of the contemporary city, and, as importantly, to spur debates that challenge the status quo. Every intervention by a guest speaker will be followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents. This semester’s series on POWER constitutes the first installment of Sessions on Territory—Urbanism Beyond Neoliberalism. The Sessions on Territory are a collaboration between the professorships of Marc Angelil and Milica Topalovic. Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/projects/sessions-on-territory/25.09.2017 THE PROPERTY DRAMAArno Brandlhuber & Christopher Rothin with Patrik Schumacher and Alexander Lehnerer In recent years Brandlhuber‘s practice has been dedicated to the idea of legislation in architecture as a main factor for the built environment. This mindset resulted in built and theoretical investigations, such as the ARCH+ issue Legislating Architecture, and the 2016 film Legislating Architecture, made in collaboration with Christopher Rothin. The film and its recent second chapter, The Property Drama, will be shown and discussed during the event.
Michael Dear — US-MEXICO BORDER: THIRD NATION OR OCCUPIED TERRITORY Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2021-07-26 | Michael Dear in conversation with Benedikt KorfCONCEPT AND REALISATION Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning Prof. Milica Topalovic & Prof. Marc Angélil, ETH Zürich Department of Architecture The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—URBANISM BEYOND NEOLIBERALISM SESSIONS ON TERRITORY are public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory within and beyond the neoliberal order. Urbanism, as architectural discipline, has been exhausted by the effects of neoliberal globalization—the power of the urban project has been diminished. The upcoming sessions want to ask “Whatever happened to urbanism?” by spurring debates that challenge the status quo. They bring together architects and other urban protagonists, who give a new meaning to the notion of a project for the urban realm. Every intervention will be followed by a discussion with invited respondents. The Sessions on Territory are a collaboration between the professorships of Marc Angelil and Milica Topalovic. Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/projects/sessions-on-territory-2/14.05.2018 US-MEXICO BORDER: THIRD NATION OR OCCUPIED TERRITORY Michael Dear with Benedikt Korf After 2006, 650 miles of fortifications were constructed along the land portion of the US-Mexico border. The walls and fences had little or no demonstrable impact on US national security, drug trafficking, or undocumented immigration. Instead they caused immense environmental damage, disrupted life and trade along the borderline, and imposed a military-style occupation and detention ‘gulag’ upon border communities. The ‘twin cities’ that straddle the border represent a ‘third nation’ with more than 10 million residents and where over a billion dollars of binational trade crosses daily. The occupied third nation is now threatened by further fortifications that will seal the entire 2,000-mile border at a cost of $25 billion. An architecture and urbanism of occupation is instrumental in achieving this goal, which is roundly opposed by the majority of third nation dwellers.
Raquel Rolnik — LANDSCAPES FOR PROFIT, LANDSCAPES FOR LIFE Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2021-07-26 | Raquel Polnik in conversation with Charlotte Malterre–BarthesCONCEPT AND REALISATION Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning Prof. Milica Topalovic & Prof. Marc Angélil, ETH Zürich Department of Architecture The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—URBANISM BEYOND NEOLIBERALISM SESSIONS ON TERRITORY are public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory within and beyond the neoliberal order. Urbanism, as architectural discipline, has been exhausted by the effects of neoliberal globalization—the power of the urban project has been diminished. The upcoming sessions want to ask “Whatever happened to urbanism?” by spurring debates that challenge the status quo. They bring together architects and other urban protagonists, who give a new meaning to the notion of a project for the urban realm. Every intervention will be followed by a discussion with invited respondents. The Sessions on Territory are a collaboration between the professorships of Marc Angelil and Milica Topalovic. Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/projects/sessions-on-territory-2/26.03.2018 LANDSCAPES FOR PROFIT, LANDSCAPES FOR LIFE Raquel Rolnik with Charlotte Malterre-Barthes In contemporary cities, global finance has taken over land and built space, submitting forms and uses to the logic, rythms and culture of rent seeking capital. “Landscapes for profit” correspond to real estate financial products which develop over, destroying and displacing existing living places. The lecture will retrieve the political economy of financialization of urban space as well as the corresponding resistance movements. Using examples of different cities in the world, both in the north and in the south, and adopting a historical perspective, the lecture will try to connect architectures, forms of tenure and political power to understand current struggles over the right to the city.
Milica Topalovic — ECLIPSE—URBANISM BEYOND THE CITY Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2021-07-26 | Milica Topalovic with an introduction by Philip UrsprungCONCEPT AND REALISATION Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning Prof. Milica Topalovic & Prof. Marc Angélil, ETH Zürich Department of Architecture The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—URBANISM BEYOND NEOLIBERALISM SESSIONS ON TERRITORY are public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory within and beyond the neoliberal order. Urbanism, as architectural discipline, has been exhausted by the effects of neoliberal globalization—the power of the urban project has been diminished. The upcoming sessions want to ask “Whatever happened to urbanism?” by spurring debates that challenge the status quo. They bring together architects and other urban protagonists, who give a new meaning to the notion of a project for the urban realm. Every intervention will be followed by a discussion with invited respondents. The Sessions on Territory are a collaboration between the professorships of Marc Angelil and Milica Topalovic. Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/projects/sessions-on-territory-2/05.03.2018 ECLIPSE—URBANISM BEYOND THE CITY Milica Topalović Urbanism has historically been concerned with cities; only exceptional projects have dealt with territory and the territorial character of urbanisation. The eclipse is introduced as metaphor and method to approach urban territories beyond the city — only when the city itself is eclipsed, can the phenomena unfolding in its “shadow“ be adequately perceived and analysed. To reinvent urbanism in the age of the Anthropocene, a widening of its disciplinary field from cities to urbanising territories is required.
Momoyo Kaijima — K1 Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2021-07-26 | Momoyo Kaijima in conversation with Bas PrincenCONCEPT AND REALISATION Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning Prof. Milica Topalovic & Prof. Marc Angélil, ETH Zürich Department of Architecture The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—URBANISM BEYOND NEOLIBERALISM SESSIONS ON TERRITORY are public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory within and beyond the neoliberal order. Urbanism, as architectural discipline, has been exhausted by the effects of neoliberal globalization—the power of the urban project has been diminished. The upcoming sessions want to ask “Whatever happened to urbanism?” by spurring debates that challenge the status quo. They bring together architects and other urban protagonists, who give a new meaning to the notion of a project for the urban realm. Every intervention will be followed by a discussion with invited respondents. The Sessions on Territory are a collaboration between the professorships of Marc Angelil and Milica Topalovic. Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/projects/sessions-on-territory-2/26.02.2018 Momoyo Kaijima with Bas Princen Atelier Bow-Wow has been working for the project 1K in Katori, Chiba, Japan. K1 is a new timber workshop where everybody can share a workspace together. In this lecture Momoyo Kaijima will explain how to create accessibility of resources through architectural design.
Anna-Sophie Springer — REASSEMBLING THE NATURAL Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2021-07-26 | Anna-Sophie Springer in conversation with Dubravka Sekulic CONCEPT AND REALISATION Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning Prof. Milica Topalovic & Prof. Marc Angélil, ETH Zürich Department of Architecture The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—URBANISM AND THE ANTHROPOCENE SESSION ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on how the epoch of the Anthropocene reframes our conceptions of the urban and shapes new ecologies, the seminar’s objective is to unravel contemporary forces at work in the formation of the built and natural environment, and, as importantly, to spur debates that challenge the status quo. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents. The Sessions on Territory are a collaboration between the professorships of Marc Angelil and Milica Topalovic. Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/projects/sessions-on-territory-3/12.11.2018 REASSEMBLING THE NATURAL Anna-Sophie Springer with Dubravka Sekulić The natural history museum was once a primary pedagogical space designed to give visitors a deep appreciation for the profundity of evolution; today, it is the institution that must adapt to support exhibition alliances capable of addressing disturbing realities such as ecosystem collapse and anthropogenic climate change. From this perspective, Anna-Sophie Springer’s presentation will address the exhibition-led research project Reassembling the Natural, while also presenting a the philosophical and curatorial strategies of the current exhibition cycle Verschwindende Vermächtnisse: Die Welt als Wald [Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest, 2017/18] and other collaborations.
Sandra Bartoli — TIERGARTEN, LANDSCAPE OF TRANSGRESSION (THIS OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE) Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2021-07-26 | Sandra Bartoli in conversation with Tanja HerdtCONCEPT AND REALISATION Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning Prof. Milica Topalovic & Prof. Marc Angélil, ETH Zürich Department of Architecture The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—URBANISM AND THE ANTHROPOCENE SESSION ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on how the epoch of the Anthropocene reframes our conceptions of the urban and shapes new ecologies, the seminar’s objective is to unravel contemporary forces at work in the formation of the built and natural environment, and, as importantly, to spur debates that challenge the status quo. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents. The Sessions on Territory are a collaboration between the professorships of Marc Angelil and Milica Topalovic. Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/projects/sessions-on-territory-3/26.11.2018 TIERGARTEN, LANDSCAPE OF TRANSGRESSION (THIS OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE) Sandra Bartoli with Tanja Herdt Tiergarten, 210 hectares of forest in the middle of Berlin and the oldest park in the city, is a place where many aspects of ecology, urbanism, heritage, daily culture, and politics are simultaneously present but also visibly transgressed. Over time, Tiergarten has become an island of anomalies that can be read as the radical expression of what is most urban and public in the city. Among many characteristics of Tiergarten isthat here, human history and natural history are constructed together to shape a model for future environments in an ever-expanding sea of urbanization. This lecture ranges from Tiergarten’s transgression as a key to shift established ways of talking about what is considered urban to elements of the biotope map of West Berlin, a far-sighted document of 1984 proposing to dissolve the alleged antagonism between city and nature.
Eva Pfannes & Sylvain Hartenberg — WATER WORKS Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2021-07-26 | Eva Pfannes & Sylvain Hartenberg in conversation with Dirk HebelCONCEPT AND REALISATION Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning Prof. Milica Topalovic & Prof. Marc Angélil, ETH Zürich Department of Architecture The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—URBANISM AND THE ANTHROPOCENE SESSION ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on how the epoch of the Anthropocene reframes our conceptions of the urban and shapes new ecologies, the seminar’s objective is to unravel contemporary forces at work in the formation of the built and natural environment, and, as importantly, to spur debates that challenge the status quo. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents. The Sessions on Territory are a collaboration between the professorships of Marc Angelil and Milica Topalovic. Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/projects/sessions-on-territory-3/19.11.2018WATER WORKS Eva Pfannes and Sylvain Hartenberg with Dirk Hebel Water Works explores a paradigm shift in how water is integrated into our lives at the scale of our households, our neighbourhoods and our city. The lecture will compare water strategies for two similar-sized cities, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and Chennai in India, and two realised urban prototypes in Essen, Germany and London, UK. All four cities have traditional centralized water management systems. These large-scale systems are often invisible, incomprehensible and vulnerable to failure. Instead, by collecting, treating and distributing (waste)water directly where it is produced, we can integrate natural water cycles into our everyday lives and make water tangible in the urban realm. Decentralized infrastructure not only builds resilience against floods, droughts and pollution but can also create beautiful green habitats and natural swimming pools.
Nikos Katsikis — GEOGRAPHIES OF ECOLOGICAL SURPLUS Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2021-07-26 | Nikos Katsikis in conversation with Christian Schmid and Ilmar HurkxkensCONCEPT AND REALISATION Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning Prof. Milica Topalovic & Prof. Marc Angélil, ETH Zürich Department of Architecture The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—URBANISM AND THE ANTHROPOCENE SESSION ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on how the epoch of the Anthropocene reframes our conceptions of the urban and shapes new ecologies, the seminar’s objective is to unravel contemporary forces at work in the formation of the built and natural environment, and, as importantly, to spur debates that challenge the status quo. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents. The Sessions on Territory are a collaboration between the professorships of Marc Angelil and Milica Topalovic. Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/projects/sessions-on-territory-3/29.10.2018 GEOGRAPHIES OF ECOLOGICAL SURPLUS Nikos Katsikis with Christian Schmid and Ilmar Hurkxkens Cities and the positive externalities of agglomeration, have been widely recognized as generators of value. The latest UN Habitat stresses that agglomeration zones, although covering no more than 3% of the earth’s surface, contribute more than 70% of global GDP. But the concentration of population and economic activities in a minor percentage of the planetary terrain, is directly interconnected, through a wide set of metabolic interdependencies, with the bio-geographical organization of the “other” 70% of the total land surface utilized. These extensive and often specialized “operational landscapes” of primary production (agriculture, mining, forestry), circulation and waste disposal, constitute the material basis of planetary urbanization. This contribution aims to unpack the spatial configurations of human and extra-human (natural, or technical) work, through which operational landscapes become active agents in urbanization processes, revealing urbanization as condition of constant geographical re-organization of social and ecological value.
Alon Schwabe & Daniel Fernandez Pascual — CLIMAVORE: WHAT IS ABOVE IS WHAT IS BELOW Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2021-07-26 | Alon Schawabe & Daniel Fernandez Pasqual, Cooking Sections in conversation with Katja Jug and Jenny RodenhouseCONCEPT AND REALISATION Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning Prof. Milica Topalovic & Prof. Marc Angélil, ETH Zürich Department of Architecture The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—URBANISM AND THE ANTHROPOCENE SESSION ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on how the epoch of the Anthropocene reframes our conceptions of the urban and shapes new ecologies, the seminar’s objective is to unravel contemporary forces at work in the formation of the built and natural environment, and, as importantly, to spur debates that challenge the status quo. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents. The Sessions on Territory are a collaboration between the professorships of Marc Angelil and Milica Topalovic. Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/projects/sessions-on-territory-3/24.09.2018 CLIMAVORE: WHAT IS ABOVE IS WHAT IS BELOW Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe with Katja Jug and Jennifer Rodenhouse CLIMAVORE is a long-term project initiated by Cooking Sections in 2015. It sets out to envision seasons of food production and consumption that react to climatic events. Different from the now obsolete cycle of spring, summer, autumn, and winter, CLIMAVORE rethinks the construction of space and infrastructure by focusing on how climatic alterations offer a new set of clues to adapt our diet to them. This lecture will explore different iterations of the ongoing project situating them within a larger body of work on the remains of Empire and postcolonial structures that have dictated the architecture of landscapes of food production and consumption. Looking at recent work, the different projects will look at the relationships between human and more-than-human species, as well as the political construction of water scarcity.
CAIRO DESERT CITIES book launch, ed. M.Angélil and C. Malterre-Barthes, Something Fantastic, CLUSTER Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2021-07-26 | Charlotte Malterre-Barthes in conversation with Marc Angélil and Something FantasticCONCEPT AND REALISATION Chair of Architecture and Territorial PlanningProf. Milica Topalovic & Prof. Marc Angélil, ETH Zürich Department of Architecture The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—URBANISM AND THE ANTHROPOCENE SESSION ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on how the epoch of the Anthropocene reframes our conceptions of the urban and shapes new ecologies, the seminar’s objective is to unravel contemporary forces at work in the formation of the built and natural environment, and, as importantly, to spur debates that challenge the status quo. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents. The Sessions on Territory are a collaboration between the professorships of Marc Angelil and Milica Topalovic. Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/projects/sessions-on-territory-3/ 15.10.2018 CAIRO DESERT CITIES BOOK LAUNCH Charlotte Malterre-Barthes with Marc Angélil and Something Fantastic Since the 1950s, Egypt has developed dozen new towns in the desert around Cairo. The book Cairo Desert Cities offers the first systematic exploration of these cities, analysing their architecture and urban form, their promise and shortcomings. Intended to satisfy a growing demand for housing, most of the desert towns have never been completed. Taking this condition of permanently emerging urban development at face value, the study identifies the potential of these towns through a series of design scenarios. Cairo Desert Cities underscores the value of re-engaging with modernist town planning, for wiping away the dust of past failures may uncover the contours of future opportunities.
Emily Eliza Scott — TO UNBREAK BY BREAKING: DESIGN AGAINST ENCLOSURE Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2021-07-26 | Emily Eliza Scott in conversation with Christoph KuefferCONCEPT AND REALISATION Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning Prof. Milica Topalovic & Prof. Marc Angélil, ETH Zürich Department of Architecture The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—URBANISM AND THE ANTHROPOCENE SESSION ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on how the epoch of the Anthropocene reframes our conceptions of the urban and shapes new ecologies, the seminar’s objective is to unravel contemporary forces at work in the formation of the built and natural environment. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents. The Sessions on Territory are a collaboration between the professorships of Marc Angelil and Milica Topalovic. Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/projects/sessions-on-territory-4/ 13.05.2019 TO UNBREAK BY BREAKING: DESIGN AGAINST ENCLOSURE Emily Eliza Scott in conversation with Christoph Kueffer The dream of unbroken enclosure is personified, among other, in the endless proliferation of climate-controlled interiors and gleaming architectural facades that mark the neoliberal city. Indeed, the contemporary moment is increasingly characterized by stark divisions between various insides and outsides. This talk, drawing on counter-examples from critical art and design, advocates for practices that—rather than giving shaping to the new or the tightly sealed—instead foreground leakage, in the process serving as sensors of the present in its volatile complexity.
MIRRORING EFFECTS book launch (edited by Marc Angelil and Cary Siress) Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2021-07-26 | Marc Angélil and Cary Siress in conversation with Hans Frei and Something FantasticCONCEPT AND REALISATION Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning Prof. Milica Topalovic & Prof. Marc Angélil, ETH Zürich Department of Architecture The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—URBANISM AND THE ANTHROPOCENE SESSION ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on how the epoch of the Anthropocene reframes our conceptions of the urban and shapes new ecologies, the seminar’s objective is to unravel contemporary forces at work in the formation of the built and natural environment. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents. The Sessions on Territory are a collaboration between the professorships of Marc Angelil and Milica Topalovic. Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/projects/sessions-on-territory-4/ 06.05.2019 MIRRORING EFFECTS BOOK LAUNCH Marc Angelil and Cary Siress in conversation with Hans Frei and Something Fantastic Mirroring Effects: Tales of Territory, written by Marc Angélil and Cary Siress, investigates political and economic practices concerning environment-making in the contemporary world. The presented case studies unfold as real-life tales chronicling mutually reinforcing processes that bind urbanization to capitalism. Taken together, the tales narrate the ongoing restructuration of built and lived spaces in diverse regions of the Global North and Global South, charting the course of capital-led development in settings such as Addis Ababa, Mumbai, Cairo, São Paulo, Berlin, Paris, and Shanghai. The stories told, if casually overheard, could just as easily be misconstrued as the stuff of incredible fables. But real they are.
Harry Gugger — URBAN NATURE Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2021-07-26 | Harry Gugger in conversation with Irina Davidovici and Barbara CostaCONCEPT AND REALISATION Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning Prof. Milica Topalovic & Prof. Marc Angélil, ETH Zürich Department of Architecture The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—URBANISM AND THE ANTHROPOCENE SESSION ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on how the epoch of the Anthropocene reframes our conceptions of the urban and shapes new ecologies, the seminar’s objective is to unravel contemporary forces at work in the formation of the built and natural environment. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents. The Sessions on Territory are a collaboration between the professorships of Marc Angelil and Milica Topalovic. Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/projects/sessions-on-territory-4/ 29.04. 2019 URBAN NATURE Harry Gugger in conversation with Irina Davidovici and Barbara Costa Harry Gugger studied architecture after an apprenticeship as a toolmaker and stopped studies in machine engineering and German literature. From 1984 to 1989 he studied at the ETH Zürich with Flora Ruchat and at the Columbia University in New York with Tadao Ando. 1990 began his collaboration with Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. As a partner, he helped to develop Herzog & de Meuron from a small office to a global company. Among many other projects, he was in charge of: Signal boxes I and II (1991-1994 / 1995-1999) and Engine Depot (1991-1995) in Basel; Library of the University Eberswalde (1994-1999); Tate Modern in London (1995-2000); Schaulager Basel for the Laurenz Foundation (1998-2003); Caixa Forum, Madrid (2001–2008) and the Laban Dance Centre in London (1998-2003), which was awarded the RIBA Stirling Prize 2003. In 2004 Harry Gugger received the Swiss Art Award Prix Meret Oppenheim.
Sascha Roesler — ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN CLIMATES Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2021-07-26 | Sascha Roesler in conversation with Alice HertzogCONCEPT AND REALISATION Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning Prof. Milica Topalovic & Prof. Marc Angélil, ETH Zürich Department of Architecture The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—URBANISM AND THE ANTHROPOCENE SESSION ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on how the epoch of the Anthropocene reframes our conceptions of the urban and shapes new ecologies, the seminar’s objective is to unravel contemporary forces at work in the formation of the built and natural environment. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents. The Sessions on Territory are a collaboration between the professorships of Marc Angelil and Milica Topalovic. Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/projects/sessions-on-territory-4/ 15.04.2019 ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN CLIMATES Sascha Roesler in conversation with Alice Hertzog While 20th-century architecture learned to “control” the climate of a building, the architecture of the 21st century needs to learn to “cope” with the climate of cities. There is an imperative for new forms of thermal “governance” (on other scales). In this lecture, important historical pioneers of such new architectural thinking will be highlighted. Urban climatology as science evolved in the early 20th century along with the genesis of new energy landscapes and new modern principles of planning. City climate research raised the novel question of the impact of the city on the local weather conditions; “the manner in which these great concentrations of human beings influence their climate” as climatologist Albert Kratzer stated in 1937.
Jason W. Moore — CAPITALISM, CLIMATE, AND GEOHISTORICAL CRISES Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2021-07-26 | Jason W. Moore in conversation with Nikos KatsikisCONCEPT AND REALISATION Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning Prof. Milica Topalovic & Prof. Marc Angélil, ETH Zürich Department of Architecture The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—URBANISM AND THE ANTHROPOCENE SESSION ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on how the epoch of the Anthropocene reframes our conceptions of the urban and shapes new ecologies, the seminar’s objective is to unravel contemporary forces at work in the formation of the built and natural environment. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents. The Sessions on Territory are a collaboration between the professorships of Marc Angelil and Milica Topalovic. Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/projects/sessions-on-territory-4/25.02.2019 CAPITALISM, CLIMATE, AND GEOHISTORICAL CRISES Jason W. Moore in conversation with Nikos Katsikis Jason W. Moore is an environmental historian and historical geographer at Binghamton University, where he is professor of sociology. He is author or editor, most recently, of Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015), Capitalocene o Antropocene (Ombre Corte, 2017), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (PM Press, 2016), and, with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (University of California Press, 2017). His books and essays on environmental history, capitalism, and social theory have been widely recognized, including the Alice Hamilton Prize of the American Society for Environmental History (2003), the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the Section on the Political Economy of the World-System (American Sociological Association, 2002 for articles, and 2015 for Web of Life), and the Byres and Bernstein Prize in Agrarian Change (2011). He coordinates the World-Ecology Research Network.
Pascal Müller — AUTOMATED URBAN DESIGN Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2021-07-26 | Pascal Müller in conversation with Fabio GramazioCONCEPT AND REALISATION Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica Topalovicin collaboration with Assistant Professor of Urban Design, Harvard GSD Prof. Dr. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—URBANISM BEYOND TECHNOFIX SESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. In the name of efficiency and productivity, technology transforms spatial practices and impacts the built and natural environment, propelling us into the ongoing Anthropocene era. The seminar aims to reflect on how machines and systems of modern material culture such as AI and automation can be critically discussed in the design field—beyond techno-fix, toward a constructive response. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents. The Sessions on Territory are curated by Dr. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes for Milica Topalovic. Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/projects/sessions-on-territory-5/ 04.05.2020 AUTOMATED URBAN DESIGN Pascal Müller in conversation with Fabio Gramazio In the year 1963, Alexander wrote that “most of the difficulties of design are not of the computable sort”. Today, almost six decades later, we arrived in the age of urban computing, social media and machine learning. So, does Alexander’s statement still hold true now? In this talk, we present systems for computer-aided urban planning and critically discuss the (societal) implications of these technologies. Pascal directs the Esri R&D Center Zurich where new technologies for urban planning and 3D mapping are developed. He is the original author of CityEngine, which is used in film productions (Blade Runner 2049, Zootopia, …) and urban design (by HOK, SOM, Foster+Partners, …). In 2008, Pascal co-founded the start-up company Procedural which 3.5 years later was successfully sold to Esri. Previously, in his PhD at ETH Zurich, he pioneered novel methods for the procedural modeling of cities and buildings which are now part of CityEngine, ArcGIS Urban, and ArcGIS Pro. Pascal has published more than 50 scientific papers including SIGGRAPH and has held numerous invited talks at conferences, universities and companies all over the world. His body of artistic work includes short movies, music videos, over 50 live visuals performances, and interactive museum installations including Ars Electronica.
Ines Weizman — VIRAL ARCHAEOLOGY: AN EPIDEMIOLOGICAL HISTORY OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE… Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2021-07-26 | Ines Weizman in conversation with Diana Alvarez Marin and Elli Mosayebi CONCEPT AND REALISATION Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica Topalovic in collaboration with Assistant Professor of Urban Design, Harvard GSD Prof. Dr. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—URBANISM BEYOND TECHNOFIX SESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. In the name of efficiency and productivity, technology transforms spatial practices and impacts the built and natural environment, propelling us into the ongoing Anthropocene era. The seminar aims to reflect on how machines and systems of modern material culture such as AI and automation can be critically discussed in the design field—beyond techno-fix, toward a constructive response. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents. The Sessions on Territory are curated by Dr. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes for Milica Topalovic. Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/projects/sessions-on-territory-5/ 27.04.2020 VIRAL ARCHAEOLOGY: AN EPIDEMIOLOGICAL HISTORY OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE… Ines Weizman in conversation with Diana Alvarez Marin and Elli Mosayebi Erupting towards the end of WW1, the Spanish Flu was the first truly global pandemic in modern history. Indeed, the speed of its spread around the world was accelerated by the newly opened air transport routes and other lines of trade and military supply. The pandemic has also preceded the emergence of modern architecture in the post WWI era. This lecture is the first chapter in a newly inaugurated project seeking to bring the current pandemic into architectural perspective. The story will start at the Bauhaus. The school so closely associated with clean polished surfaces, air and light – has found its first home in 1919 in a building that still housed a hospital for the war wounded, soldiers and medical staff, as well as for the victims of the flue. The patients in this hospital also brought together the war and the pandemic. Paradoxically, despite the difficult realities of its foundation, the school and the hospital might have been the unlikely alliance that helped to bring about a new movement. The Bauhaus’ hundred years history, as this talk aims to show, thus weaves together typologies and pathologies.
Ola Söderström — POLITICS OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX IN SOUTH AFRICAN AND INDIAN URBANISM Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2021-07-26 | Ola Söderström in conversation with Daniella Zetti and Jörg StollmanCONCEPT AND REALISATION Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica Topalovic in collaboration with Assistant Professor of Urban Design, Harvard GSD Prof. Dr. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—URBANISM BEYOND TECHNOFIX SESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. In the name of efficiency and productivity, technology transforms spatial practices and impacts the built and natural environment, propelling us into the ongoing Anthropocene era. The seminar aims to reflect on how machines and systems of modern material culture such as AI and automation can be critically discussed in the design field—beyond techno-fix, toward a constructive response. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents. The Sessions on Territory are curated by Dr. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes for Milica Topalovic. Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/projects/sessions-on-territory-5/ 30.03.2020 POLITICS OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX IN SOUTH AFRICAN AND INDIAN URBANISM Ola Söderström in conversation with Daniella Zetti and Jörg Stollman This talk draws on an on-going research project on the provincialisation of the smart city narrative in South Africa and India. The aim of this research is to move beyond the rehearsed critique of the smart city as a ‘technological-fix-narrative’ to urban problems. If this critique remains largely valid when confronted to actually existing smart cities, it also largely simplifies the ‘smart city effect’, especially in cities of the Global South. The talk will first show how smart city narratives have been rolled out and taken up by South African and Indian municipalities during the past fifteen years. It will then show how this apparently powerful and highly mobile policy also works as a throw-away ‘lexical glue’ to designate widely different urban initiatives such as road improvements or slum upgrading. Finally, this talk will focus on and discuss various relational forms of ‘techno-fixes’ emerging in the interplay between municipalities, NGOs and urban activists. The conclusion of the talk and its cross-cutting argument is that struggle over data-power and legitimate knowledge as well as politics of technological fix are central processes in present forms of smart urbanism on the ground.
Iris van der Tuin & Nanna Verhoeff — CONCEPTS FOR MOBILE ARCHITECTURES Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2021-07-26 | Iris van der Tuin & Nanna Verhoeff in conversation with Benjamin DillenburgerCONCEPT AND REALISATION Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica Topalovic in collaboration with Assistant Professor of Urban Design, Harvard GSD Prof. Dr. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—URBANISM BEYOND TECHNOFIX SESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. In the name of efficiency and productivity, technology transforms spatial practices and impacts the built and natural environment, propelling us into the ongoing Anthropocene era. The seminar aims to reflect on how machines and systems of modern material culture such as AI and automation can be critically discussed in the design field—beyond techno-fix, toward a constructive response. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents. The Sessions on Territory are curated by Dr. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes for Milica Topalovic. Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/projects/sessions-on-territory-5/02.03.2020 CONCEPTS FOR MOBILE ARCHITECTURES: REFLECTIONS ON THE ALGORITHMIC CONDITION FROM A CREATIVE HUMANITIES PERSPECTIVE Iris Van der Tuin and Nanna Verhoeff in conversation with Benjamin Dillenburger The algorithmic condition (Colman et al. 2018) shapes practices of knowledge production within humanities scholarship and in design and cultural professional practice. In this contemporary condition, parameters for the availability and exchange of information and knowledge are shifting, thus blurring disciplinary and institutional boundaries, functions, and practices. With the shifting of parameters, and among the changing of these boundaries, functions, and practices, come into being new ways of working within, and between, humanities scholarship and arts & design practice. This convergence that generates what we call ‘creative humanities’ yields emerging and transforming genres and platforms for exchange within the academy and at the intersection of academic and creative practice, ultimately affecting the audiences of academies, art institutions, and makerspaces. From this perspective, we are interested in the meeting point of both domains, and the subsequent new conceptual frameworks developed for or reactivated by contemporary societal challenges surrounding for example issues of ecology, technology, truth, and value that share currency in both cultural inquiry and the fields of arts and design. In this talk, we sketch a triptych of critical concepts for the creative humanities that we see as relevant for what can be provisionally framed as ‘mobile architecture.’
Theo Deutinger — HUMAN RANGE Architecture of Territory | Prof. Milica Topalovic 2021-07-26 | Theo Deutinger in conversation with Andreas Ruby and Andreas KoflerCONCEPT AND REALISATION Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica Topalovic in collaboration with Assistant Professor of Urban Design, Harvard GSD Prof. Dr. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes The event is part of the lecture series SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—URBANISM BEYOND TECHNOFIX SESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. In the name of efficiency and productivity, technology transforms spatial practices and impacts the built and natural environment, propelling us into the ongoing Anthropocene era. The seminar aims to reflect on how machines and systems of modern material culture such as AI and automation can be critically discussed in the design field—beyond techno-fix, toward a constructive response. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents. The Sessions on Territory are curated by Dr. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes for Milica Topalovic. Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/projects/sessions-on-territory-5/24.02.2020 HUMAN RANGE Theo Deutinger in conversation with Andreas Ruby and Andreas Kofler The history of turning land into territory and people into citizens is directly linked to the history of military technology. Owning or even just maintaining territory is and always has been linked to the ability to defend it. The increase in human range has led to the rise of individual power. Today, one person with a firearm covers the same range as 1,300 Stone Age people—the size of an army brigade. The result is an increasing overlap in ranges of power. The lecture Human Range wants to discuss the relationship between humans, technology and land with the example of the “sphere of influence”.
