SCHWERPUNKTE is organized by doctoral students from several institute at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zürich: the Institute for History and Theory of Architecture (gta), the Institute of Landscape and Urban Studies (LUS) and the Institute of Design and Architecture (IEA).
The SCHWERPUNKTE series creates the peculiar moment when talks and discussions that challenge the multiple cores of the discipline can occur in a very intense temporal span. Our tentative format is to provide a forum of insightful exchange between the particular questions of the doctoral students and the scholarly interests of two invited speakers coupled with a public lecture for the department.
The metaphor of the “Schwerpunkte” tries to convey the nature of this unusual gathering: too short to be thought as a workshop, too broad to be thought as a keynote speech, too interdepartmental to be thought as a symposium; and yet the conversations aims at examining core questions shared by architectural researchers with the assistance and guidance of invited speakers. Like multiple points of gravitation, we see these conversations as focused around questions that bring bodies of varied provenience at the same table, as much as these conversation become a tool to identify the Schwerpunkte of our own discipline conceived as a field molded by points of influence, critical mass and relational forces.
Previous guests:
S8: Cynthia Davidson, Mark Jarzombek, Caitlin Mueller
S7: Wolfgang Ernst, Orit Halpern
S6: Terry Knight, Antoine Picon
S5: Peggy Deamer, Timothy Brittain-Catlin