Join us for the new event series of SONO Lab's African Heritage Dialogues. Hosted at EPFL's smartlivinglab as part of the African Heritage Initiative, this second edition highlights research and heritage rehabilitation projects developed in collaboration with the World Monuments Fund. The initiative aims to foster dialogue across African, Swiss, Global South and Global North contexts, connecting shared challenges and encouraging reciprocal learning around architectural heritage, adaptive reuse, and climate adaptation. For this inaugural session, Thierry Buache from Sujets-Objets will present the Porteous project, Jeanne Autran-Edorh and Fabiola Büchele from Studio Neida will share their architectural work in Togo, and …

Saturday 7 & Sunday 8 November 2026 10am-5pm – exhibition open continuously On the occasion of the next Scientastic event, which takes place on the weekend of 7 and 8 November 2026 on the EPFL campus, with a focus on health technologies, Archizoom invites you to take part in a range of activities linked to the exhibition Do Robots Dream of Construction Sites? GUIDED TOURS 11am / 4pm – Do Robots Dream of Construction Sites? in French Can we trust a robot on a building site? This guided tour explores what it means to build alongside increasingly capable machines, and …

IMVT – Supporter de la Ville The Mediterranean Institute for the City and Territories, designed in collaboration with Marion Bernard, Point Suprem, Jacques Lucan and Atelier Roberta, is a unifying entity rather than the simple sum of three existing schools (architecture, urban planning, and landscape studies). The Institute’s purpose is to physically foster relationships, exchanges, and collaborations between the three institutions and their immediate as well as broader environment. The architecture of the Institute is therefore intentionally open to the city. From Porte d’Aix Square, this small campus stands out, day and night, as a welcoming presence. NP2F architectes NP2F …

Against Research–Decolonizing Research AR-693, 2 Credits 17 - 18 November 2023 9:00 CET; BP4234 - 4th Floor BP, Blue City Lab Chaired by Charlotte Malterre-Barthes with Kathlyn Kao "The academy needs the figure of the black: we are the analytical sites, the data, the experiment, the security guards, the cleaners, the administrative assistants, the nonnormative teachers, through which so much scholarship moves.” Katherine McKittrick. Dear Science and Other Stories. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2021. 'Decolonizing’, a term fashionably peppered across curricula, is a contested concept, weaponized and instrumentalized in political battles across global academia—and beyond. What does doing decolonized …

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 …

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 …

In July 2026, the Rolex Learning Center became a place of exchange around the Master Projects in Architecture at EPFL. Bringing together the final juries and the exhibition, the event offered a moment to reflect on a year of research, design, and experimentation, while opening this work to discussion with invited critics, faculty, students, and the public. The projects revealed a wide range of positions and methods. Developed independently, they nevertheless converged around shared concerns for contemporary architecture, engaging with questions of territory and public space, housing, industrial and cultural heritage, and architecture in mountain environments. Congratulations to all the …

This research-through-making project explores the use of innovative Textile Reinforced Concrete (TRC), a high-performance material in which carbon fibres are embedded in a cementitious matrix cast with low-clinker-content binders, such as LC3. By combining these sustainable binders with the high efficiency of the reinforcing material, TRC significantly reduces the ecological footprint of construction by minimizing material usage and lowering energy consumption. This technology enables the creation of exceptionally thin, highly durable, and thus sustainable structures. The project aims to further investigate the structural, architectural, environmental, and social dimensions of TRC and its applications, particularly in the context of a new …

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.