Case Design - A School in the Making by Archizoom

CASE DESIGN A SCHOOL IN THE MAKING Ã&#x2030;DITIONS ARCHIZOOM

This book is published on the occasion of Case Design’s participation in the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. Editor Cyril Veillon Text Editing Scot Hoffman, Samuel Barclay, Anne Geenen Interviews, transcription and translation Ami Matthan, Benjamin Groothuijse, Nikhil Kini, Farhaan Bengali, Dhwani Mehta, Simran Shah, Sanjana Mugeraya, Shikha Shah, Samuel Barclay Graphic design Atelier Poisson Giorgio Pesce, Marie Cajka Photographs Ariel Huber, Case Design Cover illustration Avasara campus, photo Ariel Huber Editorial assistance Josephine Macintosh Printing, photolitho and binding DZA Druckerei zu Altenburg, Deutschland Published by ARCHIZOOM ENAC - School of architecture, civil and environmental engineering EPFL - École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland www.archizoom.ch ©2018, Archizoom EPFL, photographers, designers and authors. All right reserved. Images credits: page 117

ISBN : 978-2-9701132-1-8

PREAMBLE Cyril Veillon / director of Archizoom The day-to-day business of architecture is usually reduced to finding solutions to lower construction budgets by segregating work with an assembly line repetition of processes and by compressing stakeholders to the bare essentials. A very different equation is seen on the construction site of Avasara campus led by Case Design in India. For a surprisingly low budget, a high level of various qualities are integrated into the creation of a new school. For once, an artist, a climate engineer, or even a gardener are not deemed additional costs that must be cut but instead seen as essential in bringing the project to life. While construction often pursues a sole goal of satisfying developers’calculations, Case Design has established a creative approach of multidisciplinary collaborations where, as explained in Ellen E. Donnelly’s introduction, “leaders relinquish control to enable the contributions of others to flourish”. This quality driven method was developed by Anne Geenen and Samuel Barclay in their practice Case Design and influenced by their work experience at Studio Mumbai. Case Design develops a kind of architectural syncretism that pragmatically borrows from vernacular as well as modern architecture, and from local know-how as well as international expertise. The method encompasses what the essence of all architecture should be. It relates to the Vitruvian principle of architecture as craftsmanship and science, which depends on many disciplines and apprenticeships carried out in other arts and techniques. It also follows modern functionalist conventions: concrete columns and slabs that bear the structural load allow for a “plan libre” with unrestrained internal use and a thin skin façade independent of the structure. The Corbusian Dom-Ino model was the most affordable solution to let the architecture express itself. To borrow from Charles Darwin’s description of how life evolved on earth, Case Design has let “mutual affinities” and “hybridism” unfold during the construction, generating vital diversity and activities. The photographic essay and interviews published here present buildings in construction and spaces that are already actively used by their inhabitants. Each page of this book wishes to witness the flourishing effervescence of life happening on Avasara campus. This is the telling of an essential story of architecture. We are grateful to Anne Geenen and Samuel Barclay who understood the importance of bringing together the stories of all those involved in developing Avasara Campus. Photographer Ariel Huber has captured the vibrant atmosphere at different stages of the construction, author Ellen E. Donnelly has written an insightful description of Case Design’s work, and graphic designers Giorgio Pesce and Marie Cajka have soundly composed the sequence of the story. We wish for these contributions to allow the uniqueness of this practice to become a standard in architecture.

BUILDING AND BECOMING AVASARA Ellen E. Donnelly “Avasara means ‘opportunity’ in Sanskrit. Translations can be imprecise: in this case, you could also use the words ‘chance’ and ‘occasion’ as undertones to capture Avasara’s meaning.” Roopa Purushothaman / founder, Avasara Academy The story of Avasara is one of chance meetings that brought a diverse range of individuals together over time. These individuals form both a transnational and hyperlocal constellation, with three individuals at its center: Samuel Barclay and Anne Geenen of Case Design, and Roopa Purushothaman, founder of Avasara Academy. Samuel and Anne’s meeting exemplifies an alignment of interests that brought both of them to Mumbai at the same time to pursue a meaningful engagement with the built environment through design. Encircling these three figures is a vast network of collaborators, including highly skilled masons, carpenters, builders and a landscape architect from India; a visual artist from Europe; a climate engineer and furniture makers based in the United States; and perma-culturalists based in Zanzibar. Wildly diverse in culture, training and expertise, the group is held together by the strength of their shared values: care for how things are made, generosity of spirit, along with respect for and commitment to others. These values facilitated a collaborative process that was more emergent than planned, enabling participants to be inspired and informed by each others contributions. Avasara is also a story of separate but parallel childhood influences on Samuel and Anne, as well as for many of their collaborators. For Samuel, the workshops of both of his grandfathers – one driven by engineering and technology, the other by tinkering and repair – imparted him with a respect for the diversity of approaches to making. Similarly, Anne’s parents built their family home while Anne and her siblings watched, living onsite during its construction. This experience had an enduring effect on then seven-year-old Anne, who, like Samuel, was instilled with a deep respect for making. The interviews that follow describe each collaborator’s background and training, and in many cases reveal the unexpected influences of family history and tradition related to making. The constant among all participants is a commitment to detail where the work of labour is transformed into the craft of making. Case Design’s unique model of practice is shaped by the early influences of its founders, as well as their intimate knowledge of the challenges and opportunities inherent in making. Samuel and Anne’s practice not only accommodates, but welcomes the input, expertise and passion of others. While many architects hold tightly to the primacy of drawing, Case Design’s process flattens the hierarchy of drawing-over-constructing and instead foregrounds the importance of an open-ended design process highly dependent on continual dialogue between the architects, craftsmen, clients and other design collaborators. To facilitate this process, the team works through physical modeling and full-scale mock-ups to visualize and transform the abstraction of two-dimensional drawings into relatable threedimensional objects and spaces. Collaborators understand that drawings are contingent documents and provide just enough information to begin the construction process. In this working methodology, the drawings are not explicit sets of instructions but prompts to be responded to, with the building process as an act of becoming in real-time. By deeply investing in relationships with collaborators, Samuel and Anne overcome the trust deficit that often exists in the building process. Instead, in Case Design’s process craftsmen have room to evaluate drawings, ask questions and propose alternative solutions if better options exist. This type of practice is predicated on complete confidence in collaboration, and unyielding trust is attained through mutual respect and proximity. On all fronts, leaders relinquish control to enable the contributions of others to flourish.

Avasara’s diverse team of collaborators played and continues to play an integral part in the creation of the campus and contributes to everything the academy is: sustainable, phenomenological, practical and a place of enthusiasm and beauty. It is a project of many voices and inputs where each contributor has the space to become a leader. The experience of the young women attending Avasara was always at the forefront of Case Design’s decision-making process. While the initial choice to build poured-in-place reinforced concrete buildings was based on an economy of means, Samuel and Anne continually sought to find ways to humanize this massive and rugged material. Spatially, this is accomplished through the careful attention given to interstitial spaces on campus. These spaces – between classrooms, on verandas adjacent to dorm rooms and in gardens between buildings – provide opportunities for emergent and spontaneous interactions. They facilitate the development of relationships and learning by fostering the social life of the campus. To complement the classrooms required in the building program, Samuel and Anne understood these spaces as integral elements of the campus to be carefully designed. They occur throughout the campus, inside and out, and at multiple scales – some large enough for group meetings while others are designed for intimate conversations – each contributing to a sense of community. Case Design’s approach reconsidered the typical programming of campus organization in India. Instead of separating classroom buildings from residence halls, each building houses classrooms on the ground and first floors and dormitories on the second and third floors. This programmatic integration comprises a campus of several buildings at a more human scale. The dispersed strategy also limits the number of young women in each dormitory in the belief that meaningful relationships and lasting bonds are more likely to be sustained in communities of this scale. Materially, the concrete structures were softened by incorporating warm-textured materials – including traditional furniture pieces and reclaimed teak windows and doors – into spaces throughout Avasara. Rameshwar Bhadhwa, Avasara’s contractor and longtime Case Design collaborator, sourced wooden doors and windows from Bombay’s Bharat Bazaar for re-use in Avasara’s classrooms and dormitories. These pieces carry with them a history, and their age and texture adds a level of familiarity and comfort to the buildings. Case Design worked with furniture makers to integrate familiar elements such as hand-crafted charpais (daybeds) made by the family members of carpenters Punamchand Ramchand Suthar and Jeevaram Budharam Suthar. Charpais are ubiquitous in Indian homes, and their presence and utility offer both physical and mental respite for the young women at Avasara, their first home away from home. To further soften each building’s concrete mass, Copenhagen-based visual artist Malene Bach worked with Case Design to incorporate colour to imbue meaning and lightness to the school buildings. Malene’s sensitivity to site and context and her knowledge of traditional pigments used throughout India led to the production of a colour palette related to the site and seasons in Pune. Because Case Design’s methodology can easily accommodate new ideas during the construction process, Malene’s colour palette was incorporated after the first building was constructed. The undersides of the exposed concrete slabs were painted with traditional pigments, effectively enriching and softening the architectural palette and bringing a level of domesticity and increased sense of Avasara as a sanctuary. The presence of two distinct stair typologies – one an enclosed stair with closed treads, the other widely exposed and with open treads – creates spaces for differing qualities of interaction. The former, enhanced by Malene Bach’s rich colour palette, fosters opportunities for intimate conversation, while the latter visually connects multiple levels, creating spaces for lively interaction and observation. Additionally, floor slabs are interrupted with openings, creating verandas with visual connections to the spaces below, effectively engaging the building section to foster a sense of community.

Consultation with Pratik Raval of Transsolar-New York informed design decisions related to the building core and enabled the elimination of resource-draining mechanical systems. His recommendations, combined with the expertise and craftsmanship of stonemason and contractor Rameshwar, led to a highly refined yet simple and locally sourced material palette to complement the straightforward concrete structure. In practical terms, Pratik’s climate analysis impacted the organization of each building’s floor plan; earth ducts provide passively cooled fresh air throughout the buildings while exhaust cavities capped by solar chimneys are embedded within the structural core and divide each plan longitudinally. While each building and floor plan is unique this division of space enables an interplay between interior and exterior, connecting programmed spaces with the landscape beyond. Pratik’s climate-control strategy also included recommendations on slab thickness, the elimination of soft building finishes like dropped ceilings and carpeting, and the necessity for solar shading. In response, Samuel and Anne, along with Rameshwar, and local builder Malekar Mama, developed the buildings’ deep overhangs, stone mosaic floors, and locally-sourced bamboo screens address concerns related to radiant heat gain. Rameshwar sourced the material for the marble mosaics from the off-cuts of multiple quarries in Rajasthan, effectively turning a waste product into a key design element throughout the school. Classrooms have different colour mosaic floors intended to build a recognizable identity for each classroom. The screens, also developed in collaboration with teams led by Rameshwar and Malekar Mama, wrap each building at critical moments to limit solar gain, blur the boundary between inside and out, and add a sense of privacy to dormitory spaces. Building off of Case Design’s site strategy linking buildings and the natural topography, Rameshwar’s finely crafted paving patterns contribute a rich aesthetic quality to the campus. Inspired by Pikionis’s paving for the steps at the Acropolis, Rameshwar and his team worked through full-scale mock-ups to create an arrangement they felt suitable for Avasara. The intricately crafted surface joins interior and exterior spaces as it transitions from a landscape element into an interior floor surface, blurring the boundary between the two. The structural and formal simplicity of each building gave the designers greater flexibility in manipulating floor plans and negotiating site context. As one progresses through the campus glimpses of the landscape emerge between buildings, while from the interior the architecture carefully frames garden and distant views, bringing the exterior in. Similarly, the strategy used to design each building’s staircases allowed Case Design to create different experiences of and relationships with the exterior. In one condition, stairs are stacked from the ground floor to the roof to comply with fire code, while the second stair in each building shifts locations in each plan, allowing for framed views of landscape elements including the entry courtyard, pond and mountains beyond. Ultimately, the story of Avasara is the story of education – not only because it is the story of conceptualizing and realizing a new physical school – but because the act of learning has been deeply embedded in the process of its design and construction. For the Case Design partnership, knowledge is both intellectual and tacit, garnered from years of individual and shared experiences. Education is a fundamental element of the Case Design ethos, as evidenced by the enduring relationships between collaborators leading to the evolution of projects through an open and communicative model. There are many similarities between Case Design’s methodologies and Avasara’s aspirations for young women, and Case Design’s open-ended design process enables a flexible, evolving and limitless potential on how architects structure practice and redefine what is possible in the built environment. In the same way, an Avasara education does not prescribe what the young women should be or put limits on their potential, but instead teaches them to be confident, critical thinkers. Both Case Design and Avasara give agency to others: for Case Design it is to a vast network of collaborators whose poetic eagerness and shared ownership enabled the project to exceed the vision of a single person or team, and at Avasara it is

to the young women, who are instilled with the power to make decisions and effect change in their lives and in the world around them. Together they have created a model for a new school typology in India, one that fosters an integrated approach to building, living and learning through engagement, sensitivity and respect for both others and the Earth itself. At Avasara, architecture transcends building and reminds us that the impossible becomes possible through collaboration and community. Ellen E. Donnelly is an architectural designer and educator. Her design-research engages the spatial, cultural and temporal manifestations of events, installations and buildings. She is currently an assistant professor of architecture in the College of Architecture, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

CONVERSATION WITH COLLABORATORS OF AVASARA ACADEMY

FOUNDATIONS Roopa Purushothaman Roopa Purushothaman is the founder of Avasara Academy. In addition to her seminal role with the school, she is also chief economist and head of policy advocacy at Tata & Sons in Mumbai. She is a graduate from Yale University and has a postgraduate degree from the London School of Economics. Before joining Tata, Roopa worked at Everstone Capital and Goldman Sachs International as vice president and global economist where she published research papers covering a wide range of topics, including the path-breaking research on BRIC countries. Can you give us some background about the origins of Avasara and the challenges of creating a school for girls in India? India is a fascinating place to live at the moment: the country is experiencing a period of rapid economic growth and entrepreneurial potential, yet it also faces stark access, inequality and demographic challenges. For each of the challenges India confronts â&#x20AC;&#x201C; health, education, employment, violence â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the balance is tipped overwhelmingly against young women. Half of all girls in India never make it to higher secondary education. The mirror statistic to this is that nearly half are married before the age of 18. The scale of this issue is massive. There are 112 million adolescent girls in India. If this group were a country, they would be the twelfth largest nation in the world after Mexico. Set against this backdrop, Avasara works to change the mindset about the value of girls. We want to provide young women from every background with role models of success in their own communities. If we can do this, mindsets can change in a single generation. So far, we have worked with 2,000 girls from low-income backgrounds through scholarship, after-school, and STEM programs. Since 2015, we have enrolled 205 of these young women in our full-time residential academy in Pune.

There is no overwhelming reason for Avasara to be here – no wealthy independent backer or policy imperative to build a center of excellence for girls’ education. A series of happenstance connections with a lot of extraordinarily different people made it come to be. Can you tell us about how you started to work with Case Design? When Samuel and I began serious conversations about the project in 2013, I was just about ready to give up on the whole idea. We weren’t getting the requisite building permissions for our original site; some financial support had fallen through; I couldn’t get everything together at the right time. I had known Samuel for some time and he had just left his job and was thinking of starting his own practice. We had a long conversation about the progress of the school, and I remember thinking at the end: “It’s never going to happen. It’s just impossible.” About 20 minutes after our meeting, Samuel called me to say, “Don’t ever let go of your dream. You owe it to the girls that you’ve talked about. You owe it to yourself. So please don’t give up on it.” His push led us to start looking at sites for the school again. We traipsed through snake-infested fields with a barefoot broker, climbed rocky mountainsides, walked past some of the most stunning paddyfields I have ever come across near a site we called “Temple Hill”. We unknowingly trespassed onto a derelict school, and knowingly broke into the second floor through some broken glass. We drank so, so much chai, and had too many unforgettable roadside pakoras. There was one roadtrip in which Sam passionately argued the virtues of traditional surveying tools versus laser measuring tools for the entire two-hour ride home, completely immune to my eye-rolling while I stared out the window (perhaps the other time I nearly gave up on Avasara!). I share these stories because this is how it has been with all of our collaborators – we come from wildly different backgrounds and perspectives, but the mission of Avasara has brought the best of us to bear. After a lot of pushing, the original site I had identified did become a reality and today, this our campus. We have thought very deeply about what it takes to create a critical thinker and a woman of action in a place and in a community where others might not believe in her. We find students that will stretch the resources given to them; we provide them an intense program around academic rigor, leadership and decision-making; we surround them with a rich set of opportunities through our extended network. After ten years of working to get to this place, we can now think of the next step of Avasara beyond a campus: Avasara as a movement. What were your aspirations for the school at the outset and how has that evolved? When we started we just wanted to get the bones of a building up and to get the girls in and really try to prove the idea that if you have them in front of strong teachers and push them to think about how they can change the world, you will be able to produce leaders. I think that part has stayed, but as we went forward the aspiration has actually moved onto creating a really strong network of women in generations to come who are affecting positive change in their communities and are also tightly bound by their experiences as adolescents here. With this campus, we can now dig into the work of creating a center of excellence for girls’ education, a place that celebrates serious scholarship for young women, a place that tackles the central questions of adolescence, namely who and what they are going to be in the world. We want our students to feel empowered to make decisions in their lives – to be able to feel like they own the choices they make – and then use that knowledge, their skills and their drive to create positive change in the communities around them, however they define that. We really wanted to create a place where we could celebrate the idea of girls studying seriously, taking themselves seriously, and pursuing the questions that they were curious

about. We wanted to create an environment that espoused our values – excellence, integrity – but more than anything to have this feeling of a safe space, a sanctuary, for them to be able to develop who they are as individuals. I grew up in a very different environment than here in Pune. I didn’t grow up in a city and always had a lot of green space around me. I feel like our effort to make this campus green will leave the same sort of impact on our girls. We wanted to create a place where they just sense the scent and feel of the world around them in everything that they do. They see it outside their classrooms, when they are digging in the ground in science class. So much of it is about the sense of smell when you are walking to class being able to study in a grassy area. It makes the process of thinking and introspection so magical. That is what I want. I want the sense of it to linger with our girls because they don’t necessarily get it in the rest of their lives. What surprised you about the process of building the school and developing the campus? What has been interesting is that in the beginning I felt like I had to control what the school and campus would look like. I now feel like I have let that all go. All of it has been a surprise. When you are someone with an idea and a vision for a project, but you are not someone who has experience with building, there is a huge amount of learning. I had folders on my computer of all the different visuals for the school and they were from all kinds of disparate other examples that we had seen. What has been produced though is so uniquely Avasara and it is so different from what I thought it was going to be in the beginning. Being able to let that happen and give up pieces of it to make it better has been a really big learning experience for me. It has also been surprising how quickly it has all come about. It took ten years of talking about this school, being the crazy person wanting to build a girls’ school, to get the land; everything was so slow and then it happened all at once. Now we are sitting two-and-a-half years later and we have this. I can’t even get across this massive scale to our family, friends, and partners who can’t come to the campus. No one understands the scale of what we have done. Everyone has a nice little school in mind, but then they come and see the school and the depth of thinking that has gone into every detail. That is a testament to not only your ability to fundraise and build a coalition, but also your belief in the idea that if we just build the first building then other people would show up to support it. We always knew that we needed to have a physical example of what we were doing, and it really made such a difference. Before we had this school, we would need a thirty slide deck and an hour long conversation to explain what Avasara is meant to be. Now, when someone walks through the campus, they get it. They see it, and that change is something that you can’t measure. That just reshapes the conversation and I think that is why more people end up being part of the evolution of the school. What do you hope the students take away from the way Avasara has been made? The first thing I want them to take away is very direct. I want them to see all the thought that has gone into the craftsmanship of this campus, all the materials we have reused, and to really think in the future about taking whatever the available resources are and stretching them to their maximum potential. We already see this happening with the students. They are developing an understanding of how to care for their environment and the things around them and I can see that has really resonated. They take turns serving each other lunch, some have formed a club that looks at improving regular practices on campus, while others in our leadership and entrepreneurship classes are thinking about businesses that have to do with crafts that can be made out of recycled saris. This is all foundational for

CASE DESIGN PROFILE PRACTICE We believe that objects and spaces deeply impact our relationship with the world around us and seek to create moments of quality inspired by observations from our daily lives. These experiences, both spatial and formal, are situationally grounded, considerate to human interaction and are inherently imbued with content and meaning. As a collection of people with diverse backgrounds, we believe that collaboration and empathy lie at the core of all good work. Regardless of method or medium, the greatest form of sustainability is to produce work of lasting value. In that spirit, we aspire to create things that are simple, beautiful and functional. Founded in 2013, Case Design is led by Anne Geenen and Samuel Barclay and includes architects, designers and makers from India and abroad. Anne studied at the University of Technology in Delft, The Netherlands where she graduated cum laude in 2013 with a master degree in architecture. She previously worked with David Chipperfield Architects in Berlin and Studio Mumbai in India. Samuel earned his bachelor degrees in architecture and civil engineering from Lehigh University, and went on to obtain a M. Arch from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI_Arc) in 2004. He practiced in Los Angeles with Studio Works Architects before moving to India in 2006 to work with Studio Mumbai. www.casedesign.in

PEOPLE

PROJECTS

EXHIBITIONS

> Partners Anne Geenen Samuel Barclay

>A vasara Academy Pune, Maharashtra, India 2014 - (ongoing)

> Architects Ami Matthan Dhwani Mehta Shoeb Khan Simone Picano Trianzani Sulshi Soundhar Balamurugan Sanjana Mugeraya Shikha Shah

>K izimkazi Guest Houses Zanzibar, Tanzania 2016 - (ongoing)

>a School in the Making Biennale Architettura 2018: FREESPACE Venice, Italy 2018

> Designers Saleem Bhatri Paul Michelon Laura Portarrieu Tanay Kandpal

>S ebatu Village House Sebatu, Bali, Indonesia 2016 - (ongoing) >C asegoods Collection of furniture, lights and objects Mumbai, India 2015 - (ongoing) >H ome on Altamount Road Too Mumbai, Maharashtra, India 2016-2017 >A Second Home on Malabar Hill Mumbai, Maharashtra, India 2015-2016 >H ome on Malabar Hill Mumbai, Maharashtra, India 2015-2016 >H ouse in Hatta, Hatta, UAE 2015 (unfinished) >T he Magazine Shop Dubai, UAE 2014 >C anopy, Dubai, UAE 2014 >H ome on Altamount Road Mumbai, Maharashtra, India 2014

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>A l Falaj: Water Systems of the Gulf’s Oases London Design Biennale London, UK 2016 >B uilt Upon Ecocity Abu Dhabi Abu Dhabi 2015 >T he Secret Life of Date Palms Milan World Expo Milan, Italy 2015

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BUILDING CREDITS Architects: Case Design, Samuel Barclay, Anne Geenen, Dhwani Mehta, Shoeb Khan, Ami Mattan, Paul Michelon, Farhaan Bengali, Simone Picano, Chirag Bhagat, Ketaki Raut, Ji Min An, Tofan Rafati Founder and Head of School: Roopa Purushothaman and Joseph Cubas Project Management: AMs Project Consultants Civil Construction: Vaichal Constructions Interior Construction and Finishes: Mortar Constructions Structural Engineering: Strudcom Consultants Climate Engineering: Transsolar KlimaEngineering, New York Colours: Malene Bach Furniture: Case Design and Vishwakarma Furniture Landscape: Hemali Samant

IMAGES CREDITS photos ©Ariel Huber / cover + pp. 8-9, 16-17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22,25, 27, 28-29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34-35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 54, 55, 56-57, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74-75, 87, 93, 95, 99, 103,105, 111, 115, 116. photos ©Case Design / pp. 10-11, 15, 23, 24, 26, 44, 46, 52, 53, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 65, 78, 81, 83, 85, 87, 89, 91, 92, 95, 96, 99, 101, 103, 108. 117

Settled into the valley slope above the small village of Lavale, Avasara Academy is a residential school for young women in western India and is still a work in process. With thoughtful attention to both physical and social environments, the school is evolving through a design-build process focused on inclusion and engagement. A diverse group of builders, designers, farmers, artists, craftsmen and engineers has been involved in making the school, showing the potential and possibilities of an architectural practice based on collaboration and empathy. A project by Case Design, Mumbai

ISBN 978-2-9701132-1-8

ARCHIZOOM ENAC, School of architecture, civil and environmental engineering EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland www.archizoom.ch