Project I: Atelier Lacaille-Ayoub

Western states are barricading themselves in. All around the world, seas, deserts, passes, roads and cities have turned into sinister barriers or into cemeteries. The tragedy happens even close to the school: right at the border between Ticino and northern Italy. Migrants are being hunted down, pushed back and locked up. Those who finally cross the border are grouped together in different places: federal centres for asylum seekers, cantonal collective shelters and rescue centres. All these architectural spaces alienate, isolate and exclude. The contemporary city is not a place of refuge, rather than a place of rejection. 
Yet, migration has always been the human phenomenon that transformed the social and spatial organisation of our cities the most. And it’s still the case today. We consider Hospitality as the only possible contemporary project. A “city of refuge” is a project of a political architecture: quid est in territorio est de territorio (whoever is in the territory is of the territory).

The Atelier will explore the topic of Hospitality with a special focus on migration.

We conceive architecture above all as a political art. Our aim is to question and enrich the architecture we are used to by working with inhabitants. Doing with means reconsidering the power relationships within the architectural project. The architect is no longer the designer of shapes that come out of a given program, but the guarantor of a social process required for the emergence of a built environment. Such a refoundation would allow architecture to revive the political project that it seems to have abandoned.

In presence

The teaching approach will invite us (students, teachers, guests) to imagine, conceive and build architecture in close relationship with people who are locally concerned by the migration issue (migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, associations...). We will meet them onsite and will discuss, imagine and design together their living spaces as they perceive and as they desire them in different scales. The studio will be organized as a group. The work will be carried out and decided in a collective process.

Final critiques.