A changing landscape for young architects

AC: When you start working and aim to establish your practice as a young architect, the competition system in Switzerland is exceptional. Where else in Europe can a 25-year-old architect enter an open competition and potentially win a project to build a 12,000-square-metre school? I can’t think of many places like that.

I finished school in 2013, and I don't know if there were as many motivated young architects in our generation who wanted to start their own offices as there are in today’s generation. There seems to be a much more motivated younger generation pursuing new practices. I think there’s been a shift in interests. In the past, having an architecture office meant building schools and housing, winning competitions, and so on. Today, many young architects are less focused on that and more interested in transformation and renovation—what the Germans call umbau—as a more sustainable approach to architecture and beyond. This shift is changing what it means to run an architecture office.

Younger practices don't necessarily envision themselves with 20 employees; instead, they value independence and flexibility, often working on projects that can be managed by just two or three people or in collaboration for example among a network of friends we work with with my wife and work partner Julia Mäckler. We believe this shift is not limited to architecture; it opens up to a wider range of practices.

Evolving education

AC: I've realised that teaching first-year architecture has highlighted how the current environmental crisis is changing our perception of what we do as architects. We are the second most responsible industry for pollution worldwide, particularly due to the concrete realm and grey energy. This reality is shifting the perspective that we can pour concrete freely into any design. While that practice will still exist, there is a growing sense of responsibility in schools.

Established and new teachers alike are adjusting their methods to focus on new materials, sustainable practices, and the territory from an environmentally conscious viewpoint. Now, in first-year architecture, the first thing we teach students is not to build but how to observe, measure, and analyse the existing landscape. We encourage them to question whether building is necessary. This approach is something I never learned in school. Traditionally, becoming an architect meant learning to build. Now, we're teaching future architects to consider that it might be better not to build or to build with the intention of change, and to question the scale of the brief. I believe this is a strong transformation in architectural education. While I hope that diverse interests will always exist in the field, it's clear that this generation is embracing a significant shift in perspective.

Things have been changing a lot. To summarise, there's a new policy of inviting young teachers through guest professorships. This has led to an influx of young professors who only teach for a few semesters. While guest professors existed, this format specifically targeting young practices is new. These young practices are chosen for their ability to question the nature of space, the concept of demolition, reuse, and materiality. They are definitely oriented toward tackling the environmental crisis through their studios and methods, which may not follow traditional approaches to architecture. This brings a fresh perspective to the school, and it’s up to the students to decide if they like it or not. At least the school is providing this opportunity.

Additionally, there are teaching chairs that have also changed significantly. As we discussed, even those who have been at the school for a while have adapted. For example, it was common to study and travel to other countries. I still believe it is important to have that curiosity, but we now encourage more students to value the environments close to home as case studies with a circular and local economy approach.

Furthermore, the focus of studios has evolved. In the past, a studio might focus on a specific construction method, like brickwork, but it wasn’t necessarily framed as a sustainable approach—it was more about understanding architectural systems. While materiality is still important for understanding its architectural capacity, today, teachers also emphasise questions like: Why do we choose this material? How does it function? Where is it from? What is its energy consumption? 

Bioregionalism in practice

AC: Teaching is fascinating because, unlike professional practice, which often revolves around competitions and clients with limited scope for exploration, it provides a space for experimentation. Recently, I’ve discovered ways to bridge my academic interests with professional practice, particularly through participation in competitions centred on urban landscapes. One example is the Swiss Biennale in Lugano, where we organised an event focused around the concept of transhumance. The key question was: ‘What can you propose about the territory that connects its history to the future?’ Along with two colleagues, Arianna Frascoli and Capucine Fouquin, both of whom also teach in ALICE, a laboratory programme at EPFL, we’ve been working on this proposal. We were exploring practices that have been lost and used to define urban spaces. Historically, cities and rural areas were interconnected. For example, animals were brought into the city for sale, which was a fundamental aspect of how villages and cities functioned until the Industrial Revolution. We sought to identify these lost practices that truly organised spaces; for instance, market areas were shaped by the dimensions of the animals or the streets defined by horses. 

Transhumance is an ancient tradition involving the movement of sheep from one mountain to another through the valley, crossing villages along the way. These events used to be significant communal gatherings, but we realised this practice has completely disappeared in Ticino even though it still exists in other places. Nowadays, transhumance has returned to urban spaces in places like Bordeaux, Paris, or Lyon to maintain parks without the use of machines, as sheep need fresh grass and grass needs cutting.

We thought it would be provocative to propose bringing sheep to a villa with a beautiful, classic park in the centre of Lugano, especially since cars dominate the Valley. By introducing the sheep into the city, we would disrupt people's routines, likely causing frustration as they struggle to commute as quickly as usual. Suddenly, we would have a pack of sheep in the city, arriving at the villa where the Biennale starts, allowing the sheep to graze for the afternoon. We dreamt that on a monthly basis, sheep would come to the city, to graze in the park and help to maintain it. They could have eaten the grass, creating a win-win situation that also reconnects the inhabitants with the countryside. Using sheep reduces the need for machinery. It’s a whole system where the sheep not only eat but also produce manure, which is beneficial for the plants. This could represent a simple yet significant urban potential. Unfortunately, a few days before the event, the city of Lugano forbade us to enter the centre, as they were too afraid to disturb the car traffic, only allowing us to stop in a park at the ‘border’ of the city. Aside from this sad reaction, it proved that our provocation worked and that the project successfully questioned how traditional habits can reconnect the city to its backdrop—the countryside—which is often seen as opposed and disconnected. I don’t view it as a potential architecture for the future but rather as a matter of bioregionalism. This involves local markets, food traditions, and local activities that can help reconnect people.

Rediscovering rural potential

AC: I’m from Paris but also deeply connected to a rural area called le Limousin, which is very sparsely populated—there are more cows than people. In these small villages, there’s little support, and no one pays attention to them. They don’t have the funds to invest in public spaces, so these areas have missed a great opportunity to respond to the environmental crisis. Living in the countryside, you’re surrounded by a food chain and fantastic construction materials that people used for centuries. However, the food produced there is often sold far away; for example, a farmer near my parents sells cows to an Italian company that feeds them, and then they come back to France for butchering. This is absurd.

In the village next to us, the public space lacks trees and is filled with concrete. If you ask me how this could translate into practice, I think the next step is to engage with these villages and help them understand the quality of their environment. Through simple actions, they could improve public spaces and renovate existing, abandoned houses instead of investing in new concrete blocks. When they see a building falling apart, they fear renovation due to costs, so they opt to build new houses that don’t create urban space for new residents. This is what I learned from working with Harry Guger, focusing on a territorial approach—what we now call a regional approach. It involves understanding the layers and systems that make a place function. For instance, examining a region's water system can reveal how it has historically shaped the economy and why people have left.

Mapping can help identify what a place needs to function effectively. The primary obstacles often come down to money and politics. However, this mapping exercise can lead to strong architectural propositions. You may discover potential for a paper factory or realise that a village lacks a school, which would benefit not just that village but also nearby towns that currently send their children 20 kilometres away. This type of mapping provides grounded answers with clear architectural proposals. In practice, though, it’s not easy because no one pays for it. However, I think this is changing. People are increasingly recognising the value of a local approach, even politicians. The arguments for this perspective are becoming stronger.

Lessons learned

AC: It can be very difficult to sustain research on a budget. One project I really loved working on that serves as a bit of an anecdote. A woman bought a piece of land for farming and horse breeding in the middle of France, near where my parents live. Thanks to my father, we got in contact with her because she needed to build a house. In France, if it's agricultural land, you're not allowed to build a house unless you can demonstrate that you need one for your business. For us, this was super interesting because the land was essentially a blank slate. We had to work with her to understand how the house would connect to the farm's organisation and talk to the commune, which was enlightening. I realised that it could be interesting to extend our findings into a cartographic study. We did this primarily for ourselves, but it wasn’t easy to explain it to her. She just wanted to know where we would put the house—close to the road for accessibility—but our approach required more context. We didn’t fully show her the cartography work because we felt she might not grasp its significance. 

Ultimately, this approach allowed us to develop a design that was a no-foundation wooden pavilion, literally touching the ground, with minimal technology, including a very independent heating system in the middle of the countryside using local materials. It wasn’t urban, but it was a fascinating project that highlighted the potential of our study in developing a sustainable architecture that responds to the territory. On the downside, the client was extremely complicated to manage. She thought hiring an architect would be cheap and didn’t understand the need for detailed construction plans. She expected the plans for the building permit to serve as construction plans that she could take and use without us. When we reached the point of the building permit, she looked at the plans and said she couldn't build a house with them. We explained that she could get quotes from the carpenter, roof specialist, and electricians, but these were not construction plans. She got frustrated, believing that an architect's plans should suffice for building. That was a bit sad for us. We believed in the importance of building the project. It’s often the case that a first reference project can help a practice grow. Building this house could have provided a strong foundation for us. But it became difficult to accept that we had invested so much work for very little compensation. We thought, ‘This is a reference project. If you build it, it will be amazing.’ But then we realised she didn’t want us involved in the construction.

Now after a few years in Berlin with projects, my wife Julia Mäckler and I are establishing an office together called studio mäc, based in Paris working between France, Germany and Switzerland. Our practice focuses on the transformation of existing condition, raw and local material, from landscape to architecture that offer specific and poetic answers. In parallel, I am back at ALICE EPFL as academic head for the 1st year of Architecture, exploring and developing 1/1 installation into the territory to reveal potentialities.