Agenda
Through construction and use, the built environment is a major driver of global warming and of relentless environmental and social damage. Complicit to resources, wealth, labor, value, and cultural extraction, the necessity to turn to a less destructive, ‘non-extractive’ and benevolent architecture is undisputed. Believing that design disciplines must pivot and wholeheartedly face the current social and climatic urgencies by rewiring themselves towards mitigating and repairing the harm, the research and design laboratory RIOT (Research and Innovation On architecture, urban design and Territory) within the Institute of Architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology-EPFL utilizes tactics and strategies to radicalize the field—by design. To paraphrase Fred Moten, decolonizing, depatriarchalizing, and decarbonizing the university may not be possible; still, these decolonial, emancipatory, and non-extractive works are to be conducted within the institution.
Teaching
Fall:
In Service Of:
“ magnis. Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet. The university needs teaching labor, despite itself, or as itself, self-identical with and thereby erased by it. It is not teaching that holds this social capacity, but something that produces the not visible other side of teaching, a thinking through the skin of teaching toward a collective orientation to the knowledge object as future project, and a commitment to what we want to call the prophetic organization. But it is teaching that brings us in. Duis diam netus augue lectus congue elementum mattis mauris ”
Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons : Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Wivenhoe ; New York ; Port Watson: Minor Compositions. pp 27
Teaching is unlearning as much as learning and relearning. RIOT is set to contribute to a new spatial social contract centering on racial, social, and environmental justice—primarily through and within the studio. Advocating for a true curriculum revolution, we strive to change power relations in architecture and urban design while understanding that the education of designers is but one way to foster change |1|. RIOT’s pedagogy is based on a research-design approach, addressing first the political economy of space, namely exposing the actors and forces engaged in space production, from real-estate mechanisms to housing policies and sustainability norms, before diving into informed designs.
|1| Charlotte Malterre-Barthes and Dubravka Sekulić, "Curriculum Repair," ARCH+ The Great Repair, no. 250 (2023).
Teaching
Type
People
Year
Research
“Architecture presumable has more to learn than to teach in the study of global politics. As the warm pools for new urban contagions, however, these real estate cocktails are also critical materializations of digital capitalism. magnis. Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet. dolor sic amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet. A special kind of architectural research may contribute to global studies some vivid evidence of another set of mechanisms, perhaps as telling as financial and political indicators in charactering the market's weakness, resilience, or violence.”
Easterling, Keller. 2005. Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades. Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press.
RIOT investigates primarily the relations between resource consumption, commodities, and the built environment, and is set on uncovering the mechanisms that underpin the production of space, framed by financing modes, legal and governance mechanisms, and design and organizing processes — toward action. We believe that for non-extractive regimes of materiality to emerge, spatial research must address societal, economic, political, cultural, ecological, and material issues and their attending power structures. Literacy on resources, governance, logistics, ecology, and economy magnis. Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet. are thus key to facing the climate emergency. In this task, RIOT is inspired by a diverse range of people — many black, brown, indigenous, queer, crip, and feminist activists, engaged students, radical scientists, environmental scholars, and postcolonial, antiracist researchers — engaged in the arduous task of untangling material regimes, architecture, and exploitation within the built environment.
Research
Type
People
Year
Action
“Enough. Stop. That's what it's gonna take. Yeah, I know voting is important yeah right? Yes, but feet on the ground and fists in the air are also important.”
Transcript: Kurt Russo on the People under the Sea [ENCORE] /345.” 2023. For the Wild. August 23, 2023.
Buildings rely on grime—requiring resource extraction throughout their entire lifecycle, from their capital funding to the materials used in construction and daily operations. To consider this earnestly means to face that most structures—past, present and future ones—have a contentious and continuous material legacy that goes beyond carbon-emissions. magnis. Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet. dolor sic amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet. At RIOT, we believe that there must be a complete overhaul of architectural and construction cultures, and we gear our energy toward this shift by using all sort of media.
|1| Image Credit: Baumann, Heinz, Street Cleaning, 1980-1982. ETH Bildarchiv, Bern, Bärenplatz.
Action
Type
People
Year
People
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes (she/her/hers) is an architect, urban designer, and Assistant Professor of Architectural and Urban Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). Most recently, she was Assistant Professor of Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she taught studios and seminars. She launched in 2021 the initiative ‘A Global Moratorium on New Construction’ interrogating current protocols of development and urging for a profound reform of planning disciplines to face the climate and social emergency. She directed, managed, and taught the post-graduate Master of Advanced Studies in Urban Design at ETH Zurich from 2014-2019, focusing on migration and urbanism in Mediterranean cities (Marseille, Tangier, Beirut). As a guest professor at TU Berlin (2018-2019), she investigated and challenged the predatorily modus operandi of real estate in the German capital. During her time at ETH Zürich, she co-founded the Parity Group, a militant grassroots collective laboring toward equity in architecture, which received the Meret Oppenheim Prize 2023.
Antoine Iweins (he/him/his) is part of the teaching core team at RIOT, graduated in 2022 from architecture at EPFL. Engaged in the politics of pedagogies at the university, he has edited with L’Atelier Magazine the issues “Identity” (2021) and “Impact” (2022). His diploma work with Noémie Zurbriggen, in dialogue with associative efforts, has been m(t)aking time space to discuss and act on issues of knowledge legitimacy and its (re)production in architectural culture.
Kathlyn Kao (she/her/hers), Harvard GSD, is a scientific collaborator at RIOT, a practicing architect at Dream the Combine; and co-founder of Paperwork. Her work focuses on questions of immeasurability and intangibility within regimes of land ownership and environmental law. Her thesis, “In the Capital of Absence, I am Longing for___,” supported by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, focuses on the spatial remittance economy of overseas Filipina domestic workers. She has given talks at institutions including Bauhaus-Universität Weimar University, ABK Stuttgart, and ARQ Technológico de Monterrey. Kathlyn received a B. Arch from Cal Poly (SLO) and is a registered architect in New York, USA.
Nagy Makhlouf (he/him/his), ENSA Paris-Malaquais, is currently writing a doctoral dissertation within the ALICE and RIOT laboratories at EPFL, where he addresses the relationships between suburban planning, liberal governmentalities, and computational drawing in the U.S.A. He has recently contributed to the book Unearthing Traces and magazines such as Trou Noir and Polygone.
Summer Islam (she/her/hers), AADipl (hons), is a doctoral candidate with the RIOT. Her research explores the potential for a decarbonised built environment that prioritizes ecosystems over industry. She is also a founding Director of Material Cultures, an architecture and research practice founded to bring together design, material research and strategic thinking to make meaningful progress towards a post-carbon built environment. Material Cultures recently co-authored Material Reform, a book which assembles a series of essays exploring the cultures, systems, and infrastructures that shape the architectural industry and the destructive ecologies it fosters. Summer has taught architecture at the London Metropolitan University, the Bartlett School of Architecture, and Central St Martins.
Saira Mohamed (she/her/hers) has worked with EPFL for the past two decades, she has significant experience working in various laboratories throughout her career. At RIOT, she has been a key actor in managing the essential functions, overseeing everything from finances and HR to logistics and travel coordination. She ensures that the lab’s activities run smoothly. Beyond EPFL, Saira volunteers within a charitable foundation and dedicates herself to positively impacting society by providing assistance to those in need and promoting values of solidarity and mutual aid. In this context, she has worked with refugees and people in financial difficulties, providing material and social support. Looking ahead, she plans to extend her involvement to include participation with elderly residents at nursing homes (EMS).
Collaborators:
ACAN
agps
Alia Bengana Architecture
Archizoom
ASAR
Assemble
CRL
DRAG Lab
Dream the Combine
Elise Misao Hunchuck
Filipe Calvao
Huda Tayob
Material Cultures
Motor Productions
New South
Something Fantastic
TPOD
THEMA
Villalba Studio
Teaching Assistants:
Carolina Pichler
Laure Melati Dekoninck
Paulina Ornella Beron
Credits:
Website Design: Something Fantastic with Villalba Studio
Graphic Identity: Something Fantastic
Agenda
Through construction and use, the built environment is a major driver of global warming and of relentless environmental and social damage. Complicit to resources, wealth, labor, value, and cultural extraction, the necessity to turn to a less destructive, ‘non-extractive’ and benevolent architecture is undisputed. Believing that design disciplines must pivot and wholeheartedly face the current social and climatic urgencies by rewiring themselves towards mitigating and repairing the harm, the research and design laboratory RIOT (Research and Innovation On architecture, urban design and Territory) within the Institute of Architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology-EPFL utilizes tactics and strategies to radicalize the field—by design. To paraphrase Fred Moten, decolonizing, depatriarchalizing, and decarbonizing the university may not be possible; still, these decolonial, emancipatory, and non-extractive works are to be conducted within the institution.
Teaching
Fall:
In Service Of:
“ magnis. Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet. The university needs teaching labor, despite itself, or as itself, self-identical with and thereby erased by it. It is not teaching that holds this social capacity, but something that produces the not visible other side of teaching, a thinking through the skin of teaching toward a collective orientation to the knowledge object as future project, and a commitment to what we want to call the prophetic organization. But it is teaching that brings us in. Duis diam netus augue lectus congue elementum mattis mauris ”
Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons : Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Wivenhoe ; New York ; Port Watson: Minor Compositions. pp 27
Teaching is unlearning as much as learning and relearning. RIOT is set to contribute to a new spatial social contract centering on racial, social, and environmental justice—primarily through and within the studio. Advocating for a true curriculum revolution, we strive to change power relations in architecture and urban design while understanding that the education of designers is but one way to foster change |1|. RIOT’s pedagogy is based on a research-design approach, addressing first the political economy of space, namely exposing the actors and forces engaged in space production, from real-estate mechanisms to housing policies and sustainability norms, before diving into informed designs.
|1| Charlotte Malterre-Barthes and Dubravka Sekulić, "Curriculum Repair," ARCH+ The Great Repair, no. 250 (2023).
Teaching
Type
People
Year
Research
“Architecture presumable has more to learn than to teach in the study of global politics. As the warm pools for new urban contagions, however, these real estate cocktails are also critical materializations of digital capitalism. A special kind of architectural research may contribute to global studies some vivid evidence of another set of mechanisms, perhaps as telling as financial and political indicators in charactering the market's weakness, resilience, or violence.”
Easterling, Keller. 2005. Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades. Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press.
RIOT investigates primarily the relations between resource consumption, commodities, and the built environment, and is set on uncovering the mechanisms that underpin the production of space, framed by financing modes, legal and governance mechanisms, and design and organizing processes—toward action. We believe that for non-extractive regimes of materiality to emerge, spatial research must address societal, economic, political, cultural, ecological, and material issues and their attending power structures. Literacy on resources, governance, logistics, ecology, and economy magnis. Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet. are thus key to facing the climate emergency. In this task, RIOT is inspired by a diverse range of people – many black, brown, indigenous, queer, crip, and feminist activists, engaged students, radical scientists, environmental scholars, and postcolonial, antiracist researchers - engaged in the arduous task of untangling material regimes, architecture, and exploitation within the built environment.
Research
Type
People
Year
Action
“Enough. Stop. That's what it's gonna take. Yeah, I know voting is important yeah right? Yes, but feet on the ground and fists in the air are also important.”
Transcript: Kurt Russo on the People under the Sea [ENCORE] /345.” 2023. For the Wild. August 23, 2023.
Buildings rely on grime—requiring resource extraction throughout their entire lifecycle, from their capital funding to the materials used in construction and daily operations. To consider this earnestly means to face that most structures—past, present and future ones—have a contentious and continuous material legacy that goes beyond carbon-emissions. magnis. Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet. dolor sic amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet. At RIOT, we believe that there must be a complete overhaul of architectural and construction cultures, and we gear our energy toward this shift by using all sort of media.
|1| Image Credit: Baumann, Heinz, Street Cleaning, 1980-1982. ETH Bildarchiv, Bern, Bärenplatz.
Action
Type
People
Year
People
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes (she/her/hers) is an architect, urban designer, and Assistant Professor of Architectural and Urban Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). Most recently, she was Assistant Professor of Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she taught studios and seminars. She launched in 2021 the initiative ‘A Global Moratorium on New Construction’ interrogating current protocols of development and urging for a profound reform of planning disciplines to face the climate and social emergency. She directed, managed, and taught the post-graduate Master of Advanced Studies in Urban Design at ETH Zurich from 2014-2019, focusing on migration and urbanism in Mediterranean cities (Marseille, Tangier, Beirut). As a guest professor at TU Berlin (2018-2019), she investigated and challenged the predatorily modus operandi of real estate in the German capital. During her time at ETH Zürich, she co-founded the Parity Group, a militant grassroots collective laboring toward equity in architecture, which received the Meret Oppenheim Prize 2023.
Antoine Iweins (he/him/his) is part of the teaching core team at RIOT, graduated in 2022 from architecture at EPFL. Engaged in the politics of pedagogies at the university, he has edited with L’Atelier Magazine the issues “Identity” (2021) and “Impact” (2022). His diploma work with Noémie Zurbriggen, in dialogue with associative efforts, has been m(t)aking time space to discuss and act on issues of knowledge legitimacy and its (re)production in architectural culture.
Kathlyn Kao (she/her/hers), Harvard GSD, is a scientific collaborator at RIOT, a practicing architect at Dream the Combine; and co-founder of Paperwork. Her work focuses on questions of immeasurability and intangibility within regimes of land ownership and environmental law. Her thesis, “In the Capital of Absence, I am Longing for___,” supported by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, focuses on the spatial remittance economy of overseas Filipina domestic workers. She has given talks at institutions including Bauhaus-Universität Weimar University, ABK Stuttgart, and ARQ Technológico de Monterrey. Kathlyn received a B. Arch from Cal Poly (SLO) and is a registered architect in New York, USA.
Nagy Makhlouf (he/him/his), ENSA Paris-Malaquais, is currently writing a doctoral dissertation within the ALICE and RIOT laboratories at EPFL, where he addresses the relationships between suburban planning, liberal governmentalities, and computational drawing in the U.S.A. He has recently contributed to the book Unearthing Traces and magazines such as Trou Noir and Polygone.
Summer Islam (she/her/hers), AADipl (hons), is a doctoral candidate with the RIOT. Her research explores the potential for a decarbonised built environment that prioritizes ecosystems over industry. She is also a founding Director of Material Cultures, an architecture and research practice founded to bring together design, material research and strategic thinking to make meaningful progress towards a post-carbon built environment. Material Cultures recently co-authored Material Reform, a book which assembles a series of essays exploring the cultures, systems, and infrastructures that shape the architectural industry and the destructive ecologies it fosters. Summer has taught architecture at the London Metropolitan University, the Bartlett School of Architecture, and Central St Martins.
Saira Mohamed (she/her/hers) has worked with EPFL for the past two decades, she has significant experience working in various laboratories throughout her career. At RIOT, she has been a key actor in managing the essential functions, overseeing everything from finances and HR to logistics and travel coordination. She ensures that the lab’s activities run smoothly. Beyond EPFL, Saira volunteers within a charitable foundation and dedicates herself to positively impacting society by providing assistance to those in need and promoting values of solidarity and mutual aid. In this context, she has worked with refugees and people in financial difficulties, providing material and social support. Looking ahead, she plans to extend her involvement to include participation with elderly residents at nursing homes (EMS).
Teaching Assistants:
Laure Melati Dekoninck
Paulina Ornella Beron
Credits:
Website Design: Something Fantastic with Villalba Studio
Graphic Identity: Something Fantastic
BP 3239, Station 16, CH-1015 Lausanne / T: +41 21 693 00 53 / E: riot@epfl.ch / IG: @riot-epfl
© 2023, RIOT EPFL ENAC
BP 3239, Station 16, CH-1015 Lausanne / T: +41 21 693 00 53 / E: riot@epfl.ch / IG: @riot-epfl
© 2023, RIOT EPFL ENAC