The project as evolution

In 2008, ALICE, Dieter Dietz’s studio for second-year students, turned heads (and won a prize) in london with their project that floated on the river Thames, changing its form with the rising and falling tides. This year, ALICE had a new challenge: panorama. how do we view the landscape? How can architecture play a role in changing our perception of panorama? In the entrée Alpine project, students were asked to invent a structure that allows the public to have an alternative reading of a traditional Alpine panorama.

The site chosen was the Stellisee, a lake above Zermatt with a picture-postcard view of the Matterhorn. What could be a more typical Swiss panorama? What could be more of a challenge than altering that overwhelming majesty, making it into a different kind of experience? The students’ solution, evolver, is astonishing, beautiful, and, like the floating form in london, very real. It’s a structure in the form of a double loop that forms a single 720-degree path. Along the path, a continuous frame opens onto the panorama, changing the viewer’s perspective as he or she walks through it.

The sky, the lake, the mountain behind the lake, the ground, all appear in a smoothly unfolding view that widens and narrows as the viewer walks through the structure. The opening onto this altered panorama is initially alongside, then above, and then it moves low and the viewer must step over it, looking at the ground. The Matterhorn isn’t ever in the frame. stepping out of the structure, one immediately wants to go back in, this time walking in the other direction.

Originally envisioned in metal, the group ended up building the structure in wood, in the EPFL + ECAL lab. The students had to break down the project into its basic components so that it could be reassembled, like a huge jigsaw puzzle, on the site. The pieces were designed based on a detailed topographical elevation that the students surveyed themselves. The students did all the sawing, the drilling, the assembling of the major elements in an EPFL parking lot. They blogged the whole experience in images – designs, drawings, construction – and their blog is a sort of visual, in silico testimony to what the ALICE lab is fundamentally after: a record of how a project evolves. The blog reveals just how deeply the students went into their investigations, how circuitous the route to their ultimate solution was, and how many ideas were abandoned along the way. This record of "process" brings a sense of depth and richness to the project, a dimension impossible to capture just by looking at the finished structure.

Dieter Dietz and his tutors – Katia Ritz, Olivier Ottevaere, and Daniel Pokora – negotiated with the authorities in Zermatt, arranged the transport of the pieces, and when the truck couldn’t make it up the road to the lake with the largest sections, they worked with zermatt officials to arrange for a helicopter. Zermatt was enthusiastic and supportive, and provided housing up at the 2600m Flüalp hut during the assembly of the structure. once the design had been finalized, the students managed to construct evolver in only three weeks, with the help of the lab team. "Most of the time, you don’t get to actually build what you design," notes ottevaere. "It was a unique learning experience for them."