Kirstin Hagelskjaer Petersen - Emergent Construction in Insect and Robotic Swarms EPFL is pleased to welcome Kirstin Hagelskjaer Petersen (Cornell University) for a keynote lecture on collective robotics and bio-inspired swarm systems. This lecture is free and open to all. Kirstin H. Petersen is Associate Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University, where she is the Aref and Manon Lahham Faculty Fellow and a Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability Faculty Fellow. She leads the Collective Embodied Intelligence Lab, which designs and coordinates robot collectives capable of behaviors beyond the reach of any individual, alongside studies …

Anne Katrin Burghartz EPFL is pleased to welcome Anne Katrin Burghartz (schlaich bergermann partner, Berlin) for a keynote lecture on her work at the intersection of art and structure. This talk is free and open to all. Anne K. Burghartz has been a structural engineer and project manager at the Berlin office of schlaich bergermann partner since 2016. She studied civil engineering at TU Berlin with a focus on structural engineering. At sbp she has worked on bridges, buildings, pedestrian bridges, art installations, and lightweight and membrane structures, and from 2023 to 2025 she helped develop the concap floor system, …

30.07.26 - Cities and communities have often developed around waterways. Today, they play a vital role in adapting to climate change and strengthening social bonds. Rivers are a key resource for food, directly through fishing or indirectly for irrigating crops. In the 19th century, when industrialization began, they became essential to run factories and revolutionize the economy, thus shaping the urban landscape. For that reason, humans have always established their settlements near rivers and have diverted their natural course to adapt to their needs. However, as cities keep growing, rivers reclaim the space that they occupied. “Rivers are very complex …

09.07.26 - Prof. Stefana Parascho and Prof. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes have been selected to organise the 2027 EPFL Latsis Symposium. The Latsis International Foundation grants CHF 40K to one head of unit at EPFL, or a group of heads of units, per year for the organization of a scientific symposium. EPFL will host In the Same Room: Technology and Critique in the Built Environment, a symposium convened by Prof. Stefana Parascho (CRCL) and Prof. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes (RIOT) that brings architects, engineers, social scientists, historians, and theorists into the same room to confront one of the defining tensions in contemporary architecture: how …

06.07.26 - For almost two decades, Luca Pattaroni has been studying alternative and countercultural communities at EPFL’s Urban Sociology Laboratory (LASUR). His research asks what these models of coexistence and collective living might teach the rest of society. When asked what question drives his work, Luca Pattaroni, who co-heads LASUR at EPFL, is unequivocal: “How do people and communities, with all their diversity and differences, learn to live side by side in a city?” Pattaroni specializes in what are often labeled the “margins” of society. Yet he sees alternative communities, countercultural movements, activist and artistic circles, squats, the homeless, migrants …

20.05.26 - Our travel habits are changing as our attitudes toward transport shift – with a greater emphasis on comfort and the latest technology. For insights into this trend, we spoke with sociologist and EPFL professor Vincent Kaufmann. How will we be moving around over the next 50 years? Discussions about the mobility transition underway in Europe are nothing new – they were also the topic of Vincent Kaufmann’s PhD thesis in the 1990s. “European policymakers wanted to encourage the use of public transport in urban areas and get people out of the car and into the train,” says Kaufmann, …

Manfredo Tafuri was one of the most influential architectural historians of the twentieth century, and his work continues to shape the landscape of architectural history and theory. This anthology presents—for the first time—a carefully curated selection of essays and interviews spanning his entire career, from 1964, the year in which Tafuri decided to focus exclusively on architectural history, to 1994, the year of his untimely death. These texts—most translated into English for the first time—reveal the extraordinary range of Tafuri’s scholarship, ranging from topics as diverse as the critique of architectural ideology and capitalist development, to the contradictions of the …

EPFL architecture graduates, Vincent Digneaux, Solène Guisan and Vincent Kastl, were crowned winners of the Sustainable is Beautiful student architecture prize for their modular footbridge over the Chamberonne river. Designing the structure, which serves as both a crossing and a meeting place, gave them their first taste of life as an architect. Several years ago, the Laboratory of Architecture and Sustainable Technologies (LAST) at EPFL’s School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC) launched Sustainable is Beautiful, a competition run in partnership with public and private organizations involved in green-transition projects, to help equip budding architects for their future role.

WINNER OF THE 2023 RIBA CHARLES JENCKS AWARD

The Dogma practice, founded in 2002 by Pier Vittorio Aureli, associate professor at the EPFL Architecture Department (ENAC), and Martino Tattara, has been awarded the prestigious Charles Jencks 2023 Prize by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).

Created in 2003 to reward an individual (or office) who has recently made a major contribution to both the theory and practice of architecture, this prestigious prize has distinguished architects such as Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron over the years.

Housing is a major contributor to Switzerland's carbon footprint and energy consumption, but it is also a basic need. Research on climate change mitigation strategies has so far paid insufficient attention to households' preferences and their contribution to housing sustainability. Depicting residential preferences requires an understanding of the multilevel, context-specific, and interrelated determinants of the match between households and dwellings, which are made explicit in the residential mobility process.