Teaching is the foundation through which the chair collectively explores its ethos with students. By applying different methodologies, the chair offers a design studio each academic term, regular and free diplomas, as well as elective courses and focus work projects. Through these different branches, the themes of architecture heritage and sustainability are investigated and expanded on the basis of theoretical and design based approaches. Teaching is expressed in spatial investigations and architectural transformations, while always interwoven with research. The different teaching branches aim at creating a think tank to confront our built environments through an intersectional and decolonial lens in pasts, presents and futurities.

Every semester the design studio examines different architectural realities in Switzerland through a decolonial and intersectional lens of heritage and sustainability. Specifically, the studio attempts at imagining architecture, institutions, and our societies “at the end of the World”. Imagining at the end of the World invites us to rupture Modernist thinking and canonical discourse, acknowledging, listening to and working with alternative ways of conceiving, designing and experiencing. Imagining at the end of the World means to critically evaluate our positions and potentials as architects and actively be agents for positive change. Imagining at the end of the World goes beyond linear and colonial conceptions of time and history, making kin with pasts, presents and futurities simultaneously. Imagining at the end of the World is to follow bell hooks in thinking from margin to center, resisting marginalizations. Imagining at the end of the World means standing in solidarity and dismantling oppressive systems collectively. Imagining at the end of the World urges us to re-evaluate and transform our societies’ relation to nature, land and people in times of environmental collapse. We propose to follow Denise Ferreira da Silva at the end of this World, as to refer to worlds in which we work collectively toward the dismantlement and transformation of the world system which perpetuates inequalities, racism and colonial legacies. The studio imagines at the end of this World, not as a distant desired utopia, but as an actual practice of collective emancipation. The studio is a call for reorientation and engages in imagining futurities through critical research, programmatic innovations and architectural transformations. While addressing the immediate context of Swiss architectural practice, the studio confronts global entanglements and systems of injustice

The Diploma focuses on transforming the Swiss architectural landscape through a decolonial and intersectional lens of heritage and sustainability. It explores transformation as both a challenge and an opportunity. It rethinks architecture, and by extension, the urban fabric through adaptive reuse, material intelligence, and inclusive social design practices that prioritise resilience over permanence. The diploma critically addresses context, program and architectural transformations through design.

The Free Diploma supervision is limited to student-initiated topics that fit in the ethos of the chair. The Free Diploma is split into two semesters. In the first semester the student(s) work intensively on researching the proposed topic through a decolonial and intersectional lens of heritage and sustainability. In the second semester, the student(s) develop the research into an architectural project, proposing specific architectures, precisely and critically formulated in spaces, materiality and construction.