Dec 4, 2014
In 1955 three Swiss intellectuals, Max Frisch, Lucius Burckhardt und Markus Kutter published Achtung: Die Schweiz, a warning about the increasing sprawl throughout the Swiss landscape and a plea for a new and more controlled level of urbanity in the form of high-density settlements. Fifty-nine years later, the level of alarm against the increasing levels of urban sprawl has not diminished and yet single-family houses and low-density settlements still unabatedly continue to cover the Swiss landscape. The lecture will present the premises and the initial results of the project titled Achtung: die Landschaft, developed since September 2013 at ETH/Studio Basel. Based on this ongoing work, the lecture will attempt at offering a different yet radical alternative to the problems of land, landscape and resources consumption that contemporary forms of urbanization imply. Instead of new dense settlements built outside of the existing cities as advanced in the project of 1955, attention will be shifted towards landschaft –land, landscape and the entire un-built territory as the deliberate choice to be operative within the constraints of a modern democracy and the need to safeguard freedom of the individual for choosing his/her own way of living. Weaving back and forth between the theoretical premises and projective proposals, the lecture will attempt at advancing a new approach towards the transforming Swiss territory, urban sprawl and contemporary processes of urbanization at large. ETH Studio Basel is an institute of urban research set up by architects Roger Diener, Jacques Herzog, Marcel Meili, and Pierre de Meuron in Basel in 1999, as part of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) – Department of Architecture, Network City and Landscape. Martino Tattara is a practicing architect and the head of research and teaching at ETH Studio Basel. His theoretical work focuses on the relationship between architecture and large-scale urban design and he has widely published and lectured on topics related to the project of the city. He is the co-founder of Dogma, a practice based in Brussels (Belgium).
A civic association KRUH (Circle) was founded in 2001 by a group of architecture students at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Focus of our activities lies in an ongoing cycle of lectures on architecture held by leading Czech and foreign architects and architecture critics. In addition to that, we have organized excursions to contemporary architectural realisations and film festivals. During ten years of our activity, we have provided almost 200 lectures (e.g. series of lectures 'Across Swiss Architecture' – in cooperation with a Swiss foundation Pro Helvetia and Swiss Embassy in Prague), three excursions abroad, two film festivals on architecture, an exhibition, and published four collective anthologies with texts on architecture. All our activities gained both a favourable public response (200 – 500 visitors per lecture, 2000 visitors at film festival) and a response of professional press (awarded Architekt magazine prize in 2003). So far we have lined up lectures by significant figures of contemporary architecture eg. Aaron Betsky, Eva Jiřičná, Jan Kaplický, Luigi Snozzi, Mario Botta, Dietmar Eberle, Francisco Mangado and as well many starting Czech architects. In all we do our goal is to create a continuous dialogue about contemporary issues among architects, architecture theorists and public. Our target group consists of architecture students, architects, construction engineers, humanities students and last but not least the general public. This year our programme is focused on lectures and presentation of recent projects, which came out from important architecture competitions in Czech Republic. The aim of the project is to show what is happening right now in architecture, what is new and progressive for architects, and how they deal with the idea of competition.
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