ABSTRACT
The last comprehensive review of Swiss architecture took place probably in the 1970s. As a matter of fact, the Confederation launched a competition for the campus of the Swiss Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) at that time, in which seven rms, representing the seven greater regions of Switzerland – from Geneva to Zurich, and from Basel to Ticino – took part.1 The design approach pursued by the seven rms was surprisingly similar, from the winning project submitted by the Zurich team around Jakob Zweifel, with its generic grid, to that of Haller / Barth / Zaugg (Soleure), who conceived the campus as a matrix, through to that of the team led by Paul Waltenspühl (Geneva), which foresaw variable and successive phases of expansion. All these projects were based, not on a plastic approach but on a diagrammatic one that allowed them to be extended more or less exibly, in their horizontal and vertical planes. What unied these megastructural projects was a conception of the university as a centre of production, a centre for the production of knowledge, which – thanks to its exible and evolutionary structure – would be able to adapt to changing needs just like any other industrial centre. The Ticino Group’s entry, whose genealogy could be followed back to projects such as Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital, Louis Kahn’s proposal for the centre of Philadelphia, or Candilis, Josic & Woods’ building for the Free University of Berlin, might conceivably – given its horizontal expanse, evolutionary aspect and superimposed circulation systems – be ranked with them as an example of megastructural endeavour.2
