Research
At the Chair of Architecture Heritage and Sustainability, our research critically examines how architectural knowledge is inherited, produced, circulated and archived. We examine the coloniality of architecture, including its visual regimes, pedagogies and archival systems, and consider how these legacies continue to shape buildings, spaces and design imaginaries today. We approach research as a methodical practice of dismantling, unarchiving and refusing. Across our projects, whether working with archival collections, project plans, or critical texts, we aim to examine the structures that have universalised architectural heritage as a single timeline of value and progress. Instead, we aim to highlight underrepresented and marginalised architectural histories, challenge established viewpoints, and reimagine how architectural knowledge can be accessed, shared and generated in new ways. Our objective is to encourage plural, situated and equitable approaches to the design, teaching and understanding of architecture. We aim to achieve this both within the context of architectural education in Switzerland and in broader global contexts.
Dismantling Architectural Fictions
Dismantling Architectural Fictions interrogates how architecture has historically reinforced power, identity, and imperialism under the guise of progress and development. Through archival research and critical pedagogy, the project challenges the ideological foundations of architectural heritage and education, exposing how built environments have served colonial and capitalist agendas. Rather than offering solutions, it foregrounds unlearning and collective reimagining as methods for undoing harm and recovering marginalised histories.
Unarchiving Architecture
Unarchiving Architecture examines the colonial inheritance of architectural archives and considers how knowledge relating to architecture, displaced by imperial systems, can be restored. Treating archives as structures of power, the project explores methods of access, reactivation and reinterpretation. It connects displaced archival fragments and collections with communities and interrogates conventional notions of architectural heritage. A new digital platform will facilitate shared access to these dispersed materials, enabling and expanding plural forms of architectural heritage and knowledge.
Tools of Refusal
In Tools of Refusal, we explore how architectural tools have been used to both uphold and challenge harmful ideologies. Visual tools such as diagrams, maps, drawings, models, and photographs have played a central role in the exercise of imperial and patriarchal power, shaping space, norms, and political agency. Although often regarded as merely technical or representational, these tools have been instrumental in constructing spatial and social realities. This project brings together contrasting histories of visual instruments used to assert or resist colonial, racialised, classed, or gendered claims. Each case study is accompanied by a critical analysis of how a specific architectural tool was used to advance an argument, revealing the political power embedded in architectural representation.
Theoretical Reader
The Theoretical Reader supports the studio’s collective engagement with architectural heritage, sustainability, and knowledge production. It brings together key texts, concepts, and case studies to contextualise design work within wider theoretical, historical, and political frameworks. Organised around themes such as Decolonising Knowledge, Architecture and Memory, and Intersectional Sustainability, it provides tools for critical reflection and discussion. Updated each semester, the Reader evolves alongside the studio’s questions. Whether used in Book Club sessions, individual research, or Focus Work, it invites students to rethink architecture beyond dominant narratives and towards more just and situated forms of knowledge.
Book Club
Book Club is a space for collective reading, discussion, and reflection. Each session focuses on a theme aligned with the studio’s design agenda, drawing on texts from architecture, postcolonial studies, feminist theory, and environmental humanities.Students work in groups to present two parallel readings, not to summarise them, but to cultivate comparative dialogue. Sessions unfold through collective discussion and visual mapping, critically relating our architectural practice to theory, encouraging multiple interpretations and deeper engagement.Guiding questions include:
What touches and affects me?
What do I understand or not understand?
What are the key concepts, questions, or provocations in the text?
How does the text relate to architectural practice and pedagogy?
What remains unresolved, or is opened up for future inquiry?
What personal, cultural, or disciplinary references does it resonate with?
How might it shape my thinking and doing in architecture?
Exhibition-making
Exhibition-making is an integral part of the first phase of the studio, in which students learn to translate their research findings into spatial and visual formats. Through collective group work with curatorial strategies, display techniques and storytelling, students explore ways of communicating architectural knowledge beyond text and references. The exhibition becomes both a process and a product: an active space for dialogue, iteration and critique. It provides an opportunity to challenge established modes of representation and propose new methods of making research public, contextualised, and impactful. Exhibition-making is understood here as an unfinished, living form of knowledge production and sharing, in a presentational form of constellations rather than representational.
Focus Work
Focus Work allows students to contribute to the Chair’s ongoing research through independent yet embedded inquiry. Projects engage with themes such as historiography, visuality, and the politics of architectural knowledge, while aligning with one of our active research lines (Dismantling Architectural Fictions, Unarchiving Architecture, or Tools of Refusal). Each Focus Work should reflect the core practices of the Chair: dismantling, unarchiving, refusal and rewriting. The outcomes should combine written analysis with a visual or digital component, such as a cartographic intervention, small-scale installation or archival reinterpretation, and must include a clear thesis.Projects may be individual or collaborative and must meet D-ARCH’s formal requirements, including a final oral examination. Selected works will be shared publicly through the Chair’s platforms, and may form part of future publications, workshops, or exhibitions.
