HOUSE 1
A COLLABORATIVE INSTALLATION AT EPFL CAMPUS IN LAUSANNE
Year: 2016
Location: Campus EPF – Lausanne (Switzerland)
Client: ALICE (Atelier de la Conception de l’Espace)
Size: 120 sqm
Typology-tag: Exhibition installation
Phase: Concept research, preliminary, definitive, detailed design, construction
Design Team:
ALICE Studio – 1st year students (2016): Dieter Dietz, Daniel Zamarbide, Raffael Baur, Edouard Cabay, Laurent Chassot, Margherita Del Grosso, Nicolas Durr, Alexa den Hartog Stéphane Grandgirard, Patricia Guaita, Agathe Mignon, Andrea Pellacani, Laura Perez Lupi, Anne-Chantal Rufer Wynd van der Woude, Thibaud Smith
Rémy Meylan, architect & wood engineer Whood x Mug
Marti Construction SA (Sponsor)
Getaz Miauton, (Sponsor)
Debrunner Acifer (Sponsor)
Roth échafaudages (Sponsor)
E.S. Echafaudages Services SA (Sponsor)
Photos
Dylan Perrenoud
HOUSE 1 is an architectural installation based on an experimental format for collaborative design and construction by ALICE (Atelier de la Conception de l’Espace) – an international group of young architects and researchers, scientists, and doctoral candidates from the EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), led by the Director Dieter Dietz.
Built initially as proto-structure (primary construction) during a 5-day workshop in April, House 1 is a 11m x 11m x 11m balloon-frame timber construct holding the ‘genetic code’ for future developments.
The project involved over 200 students, who worked in groups under the close guidance of 12 studio directors and the wood engineer Rémy Meylan. In succession, each team was asked to design and realize a room (a space intended for habitation), or a transitional space providing connectivity (porch, stairs, doorway). The boundaries that divide studio projects are blurry zones of negotiation over space, culture, and ideas. Accordingly, each project is strongly influenced by the others as it enters a multilayered discourse with its surroundings.
The spatial experience of HOUSE 1 is therefore not that of a homogenous architecture; rather, it is an unfolding evolution of a space that invokes questions, contains possibilities, and is open for interpretation.
Alexa den Hartog, one of the 12 studio directors responsible for making HOUSE 1 a feasible project, characterizes the proto-structure and its process of inhabitation as a “restricted physical and temporal – ever changing – landscape that only slowly solidified”. To quote Dieter Dietz, HOUSE 1 reveals its final form “not as something that is done from the top down but something we share.”