The Braillard Foundation, in cooperation with the Federal Institutes of Technology of Lausanne and Zurich and the Architectural Academy of Mendrisio, is pursuing a prospective research project on the densification of the Swiss urban space. ETH Zurich D-ARCH Architecture of Territory, with Asst. Prof. Milica Topalovic, participates with More
The concept of planetary urbanization is a widely-debated topic today. The boundaries of the urban have been exploded to encompass vast territories far beyond the limits of even the largest mega-city regions. Novel patterns of urbanization are crystallizing in varied environments, challenging inherited conceptions of the urban as More
Throughout history, cities have functioned as centers of political and economic power, from which the agricultural and resource-rich hinterlands were controlled. From the nineteenth century onward, new technologies, transportation modes, and the opening of new trade routes have expanded distances and introduced remarkable complexity to the relationship between More
European territory has become completely urbanized. The countryside in the traditional sense has disappeared; the distinctions between town and country have been blurred. In contrast to the unambiguous urban transformations of cities, the processes of urban change in the countryside are massive, yet often unnoticed. Away from the More
Milica Topalovic is an architect and urbanist. Expanding the traditional focus of urban studies, her research expertise is on territory and territorial urbanisation beyond the limits of «the city». Significant methodological approaches for the description of equivalent urbanization processes are derived from the topics of geography, history of the state and the art of education. Since August 2015 Topalovic has been based in Zurich as Assistant Professor of Architecture and Territorial Planning at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich. From 2011–15 she held a research professorship at the ETH Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore, studying the relationship between a city and its hinterland.
The bilateral research project Cooperative Production of Low-Cost Housing – Socio-Technological Innovation for the Provision of Housing for Low-Income Populations investigates previous and current practices of affordable housing production in order to detect the transformative potential of urban development based on community organizations and the formation of housing More
Noise surrounds us. And yet, as willing as we may be to listen, it is not until a filtering process takes place that it becomes intelligible. For us, the language of architecture articulates this filtering process. With the re-arrangement of what is already there, noise becomes music – More
In: PhotoResearcher, No.28/2017. Vienna: European Society for the History of Photography. S. 30–35. Images of hydro-infrastructures and their inaugurations served various purposes. From asserting power over natural resources by colonial powers, to establishing the image of a self-sustaining nation and presenting dams as nation-building and political leverage tools, More
In: Phelps, Nicholas (ed.): Old Europe, New Suburbanization? Governance, Land, and Infrastructure in European Suburbanization. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. S. 207–236. This book takes us on a journey of rediscovery into some of Europe’s oldest metropolises. The volume’s contributors reveal the great variety of patterns and processes of More
In: Les Cahiers de l’ASPAN, No. 2/2017. S. 26–29. Zwischen 2013 und 2015 hat die Gemeinde Zumikon (ZH) einen stakeholderbasierten Planungsprozess zur Erarbeitung einer robusten Entwicklungsstrategie mit strategischem Rahmenplan durchgeführt. Die Professur für Architektur und Städtebau von Prof. Kees Christiaanse hat die Gemeinde dabei aktiv begleitet. Im aktuellen More
Berlin: DOM Publishers Urban Design is art and science at the same time. Its practical and theoretical foundations have been collected, articulated and systematised since cities began to appear. The large urban expansion of the 19th century forced the founding of modern urban design as its own discipline. More
Related to the project Housing the Co-op, the research team at the chair of Prof. Marc Angélil hosted a session at the Global Conference of the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA). It aimed at highlighting the enormous potential that housing co-operatives can have for the key challenges of inclusive More
Wer den spannenden Anlass zum Thema aktuelle und zukünftige Fragestellungen und Herausforderungen im Umgang mit der Ressource Wasser mit geografischem Fokus auf den alpinen Raum am Samstag 21. Oktober verpasst hat, kann diesen nun online ansehen. Ausserdem haben wir auf vielseitigen Wunsch zum vereinfachten Austausch thematisch Verwandtes auf unserer Common More
Landscape sounds. Sounds are an intrinsic dimension of human environmental relatedness. While contemporary urban landscape planning practice focuses only on the defensive treatment of unwanted sounds, we should rather prepare for the active design of acoustic qualities for public spaces, which become increasingly important. Through fieldwork-based study, culminating More
5 Sessions on selected Mondays, Autumn 2017, 16:00 – 18:00 h | Elective Course Place: ETH Zurich, Oerlikon | ONA Focushalle E7 | Neunbrunnenstr. 50, 8050 Zurich «Sessions on Territory» is a new series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory within and beyond the neoliberal order. Focusing More
Landscape is a multimodal spatial experience that could more generally be defined as a meaningful and dynamic sensory relationship between humans and their environment. Sounds are an intrinsic dimension of this relationship – roots of which reach far beyond theoretical discourses that ascribe the birth of landscape to More
This book proposes a new spatial typology for the noise-affected areas under the approach paths of large hub airports. These areas have distinct urban properties and are scenes of intense negotiations between a multitude of actors – which gives them relevance far beyond the specialized discussion on airports More
Contributions by Girot, Christophe & Düblin, Patrick; Kirchengast, Albert; Constant, Caroline; Croset, Pierre-Alain; Isenstadt, Sandy; Leatherbarrow, David; Pogacnik, Marko; Seidel, Manfred; Waldheim, Charles; Weston, Richard. Berlin: Jovis. Nature is not simply «green» or the «opposite of culture». Essentially, it is an intellectual construct. Based on key architecture projects, this More
Zurich: Lars Muller. Mehr Indicia 01 reports on FCL’s mission to shape sustainable future cities through science, by design, in place. It offers a global perspective on cities from Asia – the most populous and rapidly urbanising continent. The series will assemble the necessary indicia to form practical strategies for More
In: Topos 100/2017. «Time», Callwey Verlag. Mehr New Oerlikon, a progressive urban renewal project in a former industrial quarter of Zurich, also included four new parks which were to provide a new identity towards a lively residential use. The article explores whether the parks lived up to their expectations.
A letter by Song Xiao Ping, Dr Daniel Richards, Prof. Peter Edwards and Assoc. Prof. Tan Puay Yok from the Future Cities Laboratory was published in Science. The authors working on the «Ecosystem Services in Urban Landscapes» project in Singapore highlighted the lack of research and tools on More
The Singapore-ETH Centre leads a multidisciplinary project Cooling Singapore with researchers from MIT, TUM and NUS to mitigate urban heat island (UHI) effect in Singapore and to improve outdoor thermal comfort. The team has established a multi-agency task force and will develop a UHI mitigation roadmap to ensure sustained efforts More
Das Werk Ludwig Mies van der Rohes zählt zu den bestuntersuchten der klassischen Moderne. Eine Darstellung der Verknüpfung von Haus, Garten und Landschaft blieb bislang allerdings ein Forschungsdesiderat. Doch treten seine Wohnhäuser in Korrespondenz zu jener naturräumlichen Ferne, die sie selbst inszenieren um «landschaftlich gestimmt» zu werden. Die More
Expertinnen und Experten aus Wissenschaft, Architektur, Politik und Wirtschaft diskutieren am 21. Oktober über aktuelle und zukünftige Fragestellungen und Herausforderungen im Umgang mit der Ressource Wasser mit geografischem Fokus auf den alpinen Raum. Bei Interesse kann am Freitag, 20. Oktober 2017 eine eintägige Exkursion in das Morteratschgebiet besucht werden. Weitere Informationen und Programm. Anmeldungen an Claudia Gebert.
Durch den Ausbau der Erschliessungsstruktur werden die Alpen immer stärker in die urbanen Netzwerke der umliegenden Metropolen eingebunden. Dies ermöglicht einerseits die Nutzung der Alpen als metropolitane Parklandschaft. Andererseits werden die Alpenrandzonen sowie die tiefliegenden Alpentäler zu attraktiven metropolitanen Siedlungsgebieten.
Seit fünf Jahren widmet sich der Forschungsschwerpunkt Kulturlandschaft der nachhaltigen städtebaulichen Entwicklung in Dörfern und kleineren Städten aus einer landschaftlichen Perspektive heraus. Der Umgang mit lokalen Ressourcen sowohl materieller als auch immaterieller Natur spielt dabei eine zentrale Rolle.
Cities never develop without a hinterland – to nourish any form of urban concentration, large volumes of material resources need to be mobilized in territories beyond the limits of the city. The territorial impact of contemporary cities extends across vast geographic scales, forming planetary hinterlands. Our research project More
Capital flight, debt, and crisis have left visible scars on the face of the built environment in cities world-wide. In central Athens, endemic vacancy, a deteriorating building stock, and a fragmented urban fabric are all symptoms of longer-term processes of decline. Supported by the Onassis Foundation, Reactivate Athens More
Developed by a group of researchers of the LUS Chair of Architecture and Urban Design, Prof. Hubert Klumpner, and supported by the groups of ITA, Prof. Dr. Arno Schlueter and Prof. Dr. Philippe Block, in collaboration with an international network of partners such as Universidad del Norte, the More
While South Africa is usually seen as a source of stability and prosperity in its region, approximately 7.5 million people live in informal settlements and the country faces an overall housing shortage of 2.5 million units. Arising from this context, Empower Shack is an interdisciplinary development project directed More
Bottom-up strategies are one way to address prevailing urban scarcities. Torre David, a 45-story office tower in Caracas, was almost complete when it was abandoned following the death of its developer and a national banking crisis that crippled the Venezuelan economy in 1994. Neglected for over a decade, More
The research on Cidade de Deus, a low-income neighborhood located in Rio de Janeiro’s western urban expansion zone, addresses the transformation of a peripheral mass housing settlement from the 1960s into a consolidated urban environment today. The violent story of Cidade de Deus has been widely popularized through More
Die Forschungsarbeit zur Entwicklung von Cidade de Deus, einer Siedlung für Massenwohnungsbau aus den 1960er Jahren in Rio de Janeiro, untersucht die Transformation eines damals isolierten Randgebiets in ein heute funktionierendes städtisches Quartier. Die von Gewalt bestimmte Geschichte von Cidade de Deus hat durch das gleichnamige Buch von More
The game plan was as follows: five colleagues from the Department of Architecture of ETH Zurich, whose positions could not be further apart, accepted the challenge of the Swiss National Research Programme “New Urban Quality” (NRP 65) to investigate measures for improving the contemporary urban condition. Whereas a More
This research addresses the intersection of two of the most important socio-demographic transformations occurring in our contemporary world: population ageing and urbanization. It reacts to these parallel shifts by identifying and conceptualizing emerging urban experiments for this exploding demographic. Liberated from the responsibilities of the first and second More
Each of the case studies comprising Mirroring Effects: Tales of Territory unfolds as an all too real-life tale chronicling the ramifications of urbanization under the influence of integrated world capitalism. Taken together, they narrate the ongoing restructuring of built and lived spaces in highly diverse regions of what More
Focussing on the metropolitan region of Cairo, this research project aims to identify the forces at work – both formal and informal, and combinations thereof – in the production of territory. Over the past decades, Greater Cairo has morphed into an indistinct zone structured by moments of concentration More
Im Buch wird das Phänomen der «Noise Landscapes» untersucht, die durch den Flugverkehr und die mit Flughäfen verbundene Infrastruktur geprägt werden. Im Zentrum der Betrachtung stehen die Gebiete um die Flughäfen Amsterdam, Paris-Charles de Gaulle, Paris-Orly, Frankfurt, München, London Heathrow, Madrid Bajaras und Zürich.
Zurich: ETH D-ARCH. Mehr Drawing from its mythological past, Arcadia remains one of the most enduring pastoral utopias in Europe. Seemingly unaffected by urban growth, it is here where radical urban transformations took place and unexpected new forms of living and production emerged. The book documents the first semester More