“To emphasize (...) dubious uses of risk is perverse, a dirty way of talking about a clean scientific subject” Mary Douglas, Risk and Blame, 36. As the baseline condition of so many territories shaped by extractive industries, administrative delay, and climatic instability, risk is prevalent. Yet ecological risk—pollution, fires, floods, heatwaves, droughts—is still presented as problems to be solved rather than conditions to be inhabited. This also speaks to an outsourcing of risk through externalized consequences of spatial injustice. Banks, developers, material supply chains, normative institutions, subcontracting hierarchies —all contend with calculated risk. This edition of Pressure Points asks us …

Venez découvrir le site de production de Holcim, la première cimenterie en Suisse romande, exploitant la carrière de calcaire du Mormont et une réserve de marne aux Côtes de Vaux. La visite débutera par un accueil café, suvie d'une partie théorique et d'une visite sur le terrain. Date limite pour s'inscrire : lundi 9 novembre à 17h

Lucia Allais (Columbia University) Topographic Modernism: Architecture and Nature on Italy’s Coast, ca. 1960 Bio: Lucia Allais is an architectural historian of the modern period. She works on architecture and internationalism and institutions; the technical and philosophical history of materials; the participation of buildings and design actors in political culture and global governance; architecture’s historiography, and epistemologies of time. Her first book, Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2018) described how a new definition of “the monument” arose from various plans within liberal internationalist organizations to protect and salvage famous building …

14.09.26 - The architectural firm Bauart, of which Prof. Emmanuel Rey of the Laboratory of Architecture and Sustainable Technologies (LAST) is a partner, recently received an honorable mention for the Creative Factory project at the Design Educates Awards 2026. The Design Educates Awards recognize and promote worldwide architectural approaches that are likely to change the way architecture can be taught. In the heart of Lausanne's changing western district, the Creative Factory project involves converting a former logistics center into a multifunctional building. By transforming an existing building, the architectural design aims to revitalize the urban environment, preserve built heritage, limit …

07.07.26 - Encouraging people to embrace alternatives to the car – still the dominant mode of travel in Switzerland – means factoring human decision-making into the equation. Swiss people are still deeply attached to their cars. Figures from the Federal Statistical Office bear this out: between 2005 and 2015, around half of all journeys were made by private motorized transport – a category that includes cars, motorcycles, scooters and similar vehicles. Even though Switzerland has an extensive public transport network, habits are seemingly slow to change, and they vary across the country’s cultural and language regions. In German-speaking Switzerland, where …

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 …

Les villes sont des mosaïques vivantes : elles rassemblent des personnes aux origines, aux pratiques religieuses, aux langues, aux statuts économiques et aux pratiques quotidiennes multiples. Cette diversité, loin d’être une exception, constitue désormais la condition normale de la vie urbaine. Pourtant, les pratiques de planification continuent souvent de traiter les habitant·e·s à travers une seule dimension, au risque de figer et de simplifier à l’excès des réalités sociales infiniment plus complexes. Cet ouvrage propose de repenser la ville à partir de ses différences et de leur entrelacement. Il invite à concevoir un urbanisme inclusif, capable de reconnaître les multiples …

Beautifully designed publication. In the first 23 pages section you can tear off the pages so that the floor plans and drawings become readable. Between 2020 and 2023, 974 students beginning their studies at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne embarked on their architectural journey by engaging in a 12-week spatial, constructive, and conceptual investigation within the architectural tomography course. The course, led by Tiphaine Abenia and Jo Taillieu and held in the LIF laboratory, resulted in the investigation of 44 houses over four years. Architectural tomography, as a conceptual and operational device, has the capacity to reveal the spatial and …

A series of imagined film stills based on the transposition of the visual aesthetics of selected historically significant films into digitally modelled and rendered 3D scenes using Blender or Cinema 4D. The coursework investigated the translation of cinematic visual language into the digital environment. Each participant selected a historically significant film distinguished by its unique and influential aesthetic, analysed its characteristic visual principles, and subsequently transposed these qualities into a series of newly invented images. Rather than recreating existing film stills, the objective was to produce original ghost frames—fictional cinematic moments that never existed, yet convincingly belonged to the visual …

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.