Vers une architecture in the Teaching

Call for Participation

Join us in this curatorial project for the Pavillon Le Corbusier in Zurich as a contribution to the show “Vers une architecture Revisited” organized by the Museum für Gestaltung in Zurich.

Vers une architecture in the Teaching contributes to a growing body of initiatives to alternative histories and narrations of twentieth-century architecture and design. It is a joint-effort that brings together a group of academics, archivists, practitioners, curators and students from different backgrounds, experiences and disciplines across the continent. It engages four partner institutions from Belgium, Germany, Portugal and Switzerland, while offering the opportunity for both students and scholars to participate in an intensive collective project within a multicultural team.

 

What We Propose

Through an international and interdisciplinary approach, this workshop engages a debate on how collections of architectural educators may reveal the multiple and sometimes conflicting ways in which histories and theories on Le Corbusier and his book Vers une architecture are instrumentalized, remembered and reimagined in contemporary architectural culture. While exploring a number of exemplary cases, names, documents and objects, participants shall be able to construct a repertory that serves as a basis for creating a critical position on how Vers une architecture has been taught at the Studio Chairs in the Department of Architecture of ETH Zurich.

While contributing to the main exhibition project for the Pavillon Le Corbusier, our proposition engages a five-day workshop, including city walks, archival visits, group activities, students’ presentations, exercises with printed and digital material, input talks, and discussions with guest critics.

 

From the Archives to the Pavilion

The collections preserved in the gta Archives serve as a point of departure for ample discussions intersecting Le Corbusier historiography, spatial practices and architecture education. The gta Archives become a site and a platform to think archives and archival work as potential forms of activism in the realm of architecture production, architecture discourse and its intersections with art. Besides exploring archival records, participants will be carrying out a series of interviews with architects, archivists, educators, students and former students.

 

Output

Each participant is expected to work in groups on the creation of short videos to be displayed in the exhibition. All workshop participants will be acknowledged in the curatorial project.

 

When and Where?

The workshop takes place in Zurich between the 7^th and the 11^th of October 2024.

 

Workshop Participants

We will be able to welcome up to five external participants (MA and/or PhD Students from architecture, art history and design studies) to join this workshop and exhibition project.

 

About Us

We are a group of academics, practitioners, and curators based in Belgium, Germany, Portugal and Switzerland. This Project has been conceived by Ciro Miguel (ETH Zurich), Daniela Ortiz dos Santos (CCSA/Goethe-Universität Frankfurt), Frederike Lausch (CCSA/ETH Zurich), Marta Sequeira (Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa) and Véronique Boone (Université Libre de Bruxelles).

Collaborating with us, we have Damian Fopp, Leonie Bremser and Simon Zehnder from the Museum für Gestaltung, Almut Grunewald and Irina Davidovici from the gta Archives of ETH Zurich, and Marc Angélil from agps Architecture.

 

Do you want to know more about it? How to participate

You are welcome to submit via E-mail a short biographical note and a 300-word motivation letter by the 1st of October 2024 [extended deadline!].

E-mail:  ortiz@kunst.uni-frankfurt.de