Course Syllabus - Spring 2025
Thursdays 15:45 - 17:30
HCI F2
ETH Hönggerberg
ECHOES OF THE UNSEEN
This semester, Unmasking Space will engage with the urban scale beyond the rational and efficient forces that shape it, exploring multiple perspectives to understand the city’s dynamics and power structures. A city can be captured on maps, diagrams, and guidebooks but conventional representations often overlook its hidden layers. By experiencing the city through employing alternative learning methods, we aim to uncover relationships and voices excluded from traditional maps and official narratives.
What are critical methods to engage with the city?
What are relevant stories in the city that are concealed, ignored, and left out?
Who defines the city and who benefits from it?
How do architectures reinforce or resist systems of control?
>> STUDENT INFORMATION <<
>> SEMESTER POSTER <<
seminar 01 - 20.02.2025
Community Making
In the first session of this semester’s Unmasking Space course, we had the chance to get to know each other. We shared our key chains: some were hand-crafted, some heavy with memories, while others were absent, reflecting the fact that not everyone locks their doors.
Silently we exchanged on a large roll of paper on questions related to the topic. Which city has shaped you the most? Brugg, Istanbul, Barcelona… How do you feel in cities? Lost and free, overwhelmed, excited. Who has power in the city? The police, SwissLife, architects? Who is unseen in the cities? The words and the connections between them added up to a collective mind map.
>> CLASS PRESENTATION <<
Silently we exchanged on a large roll of paper on questions related to the topic. Which city has shaped you the most? Brugg, Istanbul, Barcelona… How do you feel in cities? Lost and free, overwhelmed, excited. Who has power in the city? The police, SwissLife, architects? Who is unseen in the cities? The words and the connections between them added up to a collective mind map.
>> CLASS PRESENTATION <<
Unmasking Space is a student-led course in the Department of Architecture in ETH Zurich. It aims to reflect critically on the current knowledge production in architecture education and bring attention to learning forms, voices, and methods that are currently under-acknowledged in the institution. Through multidirectional knowledge exchange and immersive activities, it experiments with other forms of learning, offering a critical lens on current pedagogies.
seminar 02 - 27.02.2025
Walking through queer-feminist cities
Ni Una Menos, feminicies and spaces of protest and resistance
How are spaces of queer-feminist protest impacting the lived city?
We are taking this lecture to the street, revisiting sites of feminist strikes and demonstrations, looking for their physical remains on lamp posts and concrete walls. We will visit current and past spaces of queer-feminist community and organizing, as well as learn about the specific spatial practices on the Ni-Una-Menos-Platz (former Helvetiaplatz) that create visibility for the tip of the iceberg of systemic patriarchal violence: feminicides.
Using the city as our personal and collective diary we explore our own relationship to urban space, our feeling of safety, fear and belonging. How is the movement of our bodies through the city influenced by our gender and/or queerness?
By uncovering both collective and personal layers of past and present a complex spatial manifestation of queer-feminist Zurich becomes visible.
We are taking this lecture to the street, revisiting sites of feminist strikes and demonstrations, looking for their physical remains on lamp posts and concrete walls. We will visit current and past spaces of queer-feminist community and organizing, as well as learn about the specific spatial practices on the Ni-Una-Menos-Platz (former Helvetiaplatz) that create visibility for the tip of the iceberg of systemic patriarchal violence: feminicides.
Using the city as our personal and collective diary we explore our own relationship to urban space, our feeling of safety, fear and belonging. How is the movement of our bodies through the city influenced by our gender and/or queerness?
By uncovering both collective and personal layers of past and present a complex spatial manifestation of queer-feminist Zurich becomes visible.
Laia Meier (she/her) is currently working on her master’s thesis in architecture at the ETH Zurich exploring the spaces of queer-feminist struggles through time, how Zurich’s public space is used to make systematic patriarchal violence visible and where in the city traces of utopia can be found.
Ni Una Menos is a collective fighting against feminicide in many ways. We are thus joining the internationalist feminist protests against patriarchal violence that have regained strength in recent years, particularly in Latin America, and from which decentralised collectives and the feminist movement Ni una menos have emerged.
Ni Una Menos is a collective fighting against feminicide in many ways. We are thus joining the internationalist feminist protests against patriarchal violence that have regained strength in recent years, particularly in Latin America, and from which decentralised collectives and the feminist movement Ni una menos have emerged.
seminar 03 - 06.03.2025
In this session we collectively discussed the role of language in shaping discussions on decolonization, including terminology, translation, and ways of engaging in conversation.
Together we read parts of texts by Histoirenoire.ch and Glossar Neue Deutsche Medienmacher.
Links to the texts:
Ü wie übersetzen politisch sensibler Begriffe
R wie Rassifizierung / Rassisierung / Rassialisierung
‘Ethnie’ in der Neuen deutschen Medienmacher*innen
Together we read parts of texts by Histoirenoire.ch and Glossar Neue Deutsche Medienmacher.
Links to the texts:
Ü wie übersetzen politisch sensibler Begriffe
R wie Rassifizierung / Rassisierung / Rassialisierung
‘Ethnie’ in der Neuen deutschen Medienmacher*innen
seminar 04 - 13.03.2025
A Protest City: Augmented Spaces for Insurgent Citizenship
Mapping protest, space, and resistance in the augmented city.
If
untamed nature, wilderness and campsites are the antithesis of the city, then
protest is its anathema. Whereas cities are a computerised and policed entity,
protests defy measurement.
As self-regulating organisms, protest determines their own physicality and conjures up new forms of space and citizenship. This session explores the slippage of the modern city into a novel liquid and rebel imaginaires, whose re-emergence and testing on contemporary political ground evolved into a spatial practice of occupation, communication and reclaiming. Drawing on the concept of the 'augmented city', where material and mediated geographies converge, we will explore how protesters navigate, transform and narrate the extreme environment of protest through hybrid mechanisms of diffusion and organisation.
By making concepts and tactics operative, participants will collectively formulate a manifesto for engaging with insurgent citizenships informed by critical architectural thought and media
As self-regulating organisms, protest determines their own physicality and conjures up new forms of space and citizenship. This session explores the slippage of the modern city into a novel liquid and rebel imaginaires, whose re-emergence and testing on contemporary political ground evolved into a spatial practice of occupation, communication and reclaiming. Drawing on the concept of the 'augmented city', where material and mediated geographies converge, we will explore how protesters navigate, transform and narrate the extreme environment of protest through hybrid mechanisms of diffusion and organisation.
By making concepts and tactics operative, participants will collectively formulate a manifesto for engaging with insurgent citizenships informed by critical architectural thought and media
Richard Gerald-Rondón is a spatial researcher, examining the margins of the contemporary condition, politics and media with an angle towards forensics and OSINT. He studied at the AA School in London, as part of the History and Critical Thinking MA Programme.
Magdalena Picazzo is a Mexican architect whose practice engages with architectural communication, narratives, and fiction. She is an AA alumna of the History and Critical Thinking programme where she examined the architectures and (dis)embodied discourses of Mexican ‘progress’.
They co-founded LATINAA, a student-led platform based at the AA for actions and debates about and around Latin America.
Magdalena Picazzo is a Mexican architect whose practice engages with architectural communication, narratives, and fiction. She is an AA alumna of the History and Critical Thinking programme where she examined the architectures and (dis)embodied discourses of Mexican ‘progress’.
They co-founded LATINAA, a student-led platform based at the AA for actions and debates about and around Latin America.
seminarweek - 20.03.2025
no class
Nathalie Marj (b.1998, Beirut, she/her/) is an architect and researcher. She received a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from McGill University and graduated in 2024 with a Master of Architecture from EPFL, where her diploma work was awarded the Swiss Federation of Architects’ award as well as the RIBA award for sustainable design in the UK. Her diploma work aimed to dismantle how sectarianism shapes policymaking and access to housing and social services in Lebanon and suggest protocols for non-sectarian commons in Beirut’s unbuildable lots. Nathalie is interested in the production and dissemination of urban knowledge and data in the Middle East and the global south to allow dwellers to become engaged actors in their built environment. Recently, Nathalie has been a member of the teaching team led by Charlotte Malterre-Barthes at the RIOT lab at EPFL and contributed to different architectural practices in Switzerland, Lebanon, and Canada. Nathalie is engaged in different political and artistic actions around Arab identity and culture.
seminar 07 - 10.04.2025
Building the City as “Home”
In the documentary <Talking Architect>, Guyon Chung, a South Korean architect said, “The city we live in is, in a broad sense, the house we live in.” If we redefine the city as a house, the constraints of physical space become less significant. However, just as the residential space an individual can possess is limited, there are also restrictions on the space where one can move and stay, depending on one’s positions. Under the themes of symbiosis and empathy, we will create a collective installation by sharing experiences and imagination through sound, developing an architectural proposal that transforms the city into a “home” for everyone.
Yoo Ra Hong is a filmmaker and artist based in Zürich and Seoul. She has written and directed several short films and worked as a script supervisor and screenwriter for feature films. Her works have been invited to international film festivals and released in cinemas in South Korea and Japan. Yoo Ra also works with diverse mediums such as installation, video, painting, and sculpture. Her latest project <Maid’s Room>, a feature film about the solidarity between two women from South Korea and the Philippines living in Parisian maid’s rooms, is currently in development.
seminar 08 - 17.04.2025
collective gathering
In this session we will discuss together the progress of the submissions and discuss the topics of the sessions that were already held.
Unmasking Space team and students
What happens when space refuses to be fully known, when moments slip between visibility and disappearance, and when queerness exists not as a fixed identity but as a way of noticing?
This workshop embraces an autoethnographic approach rooted in the idea of queering as an art of noticing, a method that acknowledges the messy, partial, and non-linear nature of our shared environments. A “patchworking” method is introduced, blending drawing, collage, and writing to destabilize standardized narratives. The process demands three gestures: destabilizing spatial storytelling by questioning who narrates a space’s history; embracing non-linear rhythms that refuse tidy timelines; and defending the right of hidden spaces to remain illegible, resisting the colonial urge to rationalize or expose.
Through experimental exercises, logic and prejudice surface only to be ruptured by flashes of memory or texture. The goal is not resolution but entanglement: acknowledging that cities, like our bodies, are messy archives of contradiction. By attuning to shadows and hushes, queering as noticing becomes a practice of composing un-logic—where architecture’s rigid frameworks crumble, and vibrant truths flicker in the dark.
Berlant, Lauren & Warner, Michael (1998). Sex in Public. Critical Inquiry 24 (2):547-566.
This workshop embraces an autoethnographic approach rooted in the idea of queering as an art of noticing, a method that acknowledges the messy, partial, and non-linear nature of our shared environments. A “patchworking” method is introduced, blending drawing, collage, and writing to destabilize standardized narratives. The process demands three gestures: destabilizing spatial storytelling by questioning who narrates a space’s history; embracing non-linear rhythms that refuse tidy timelines; and defending the right of hidden spaces to remain illegible, resisting the colonial urge to rationalize or expose.
Through experimental exercises, logic and prejudice surface only to be ruptured by flashes of memory or texture. The goal is not resolution but entanglement: acknowledging that cities, like our bodies, are messy archives of contradiction. By attuning to shadows and hushes, queering as noticing becomes a practice of composing un-logic—where architecture’s rigid frameworks crumble, and vibrant truths flicker in the dark.
Berlant, Lauren & Warner, Michael (1998). Sex in Public. Critical Inquiry 24 (2):547-566.
Under the industrial and modernist paradigm, building has been a project of progress, hygiene, and longevity, promoting sterility, cleanliness, and minimalism. Mark Wigley argues that an architect’s sketch is a mining document, cleansing the site, while building insertion is an act of displacement and disruption. Maps and architectural drawings systematically exclude voices based on species, gender, sexuality, class, and caste, privileging certain perspectives while erasing others. To challenge this extractive paradigm, we must shift our tools for thinking and representing the city. This class embraces fabric and embroidery as methods of slow engagement and collective representation, centering marginalized narratives. Historically feminist and queer tools of subversion, embroidery resists the absoluteness of architectural drawings, offering unsanitized, non-normative, and layered stories. Rooted in touch and intergenerational use, embroidery—adorning everyday domestic objects—embodies hidden labor, making it a powerful medium for queer-feminist storytelling and reimagining urban representation.
Akshar Gajjar is an architect and urban & territorial designer and is currently a PhD student at EPFL. His research transects architecture, urbanism, ecology – focusing on post-industrial ruins for their potential of multispecies collaborative survival. He studied architecture and urban design at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, EPFL and ETH Zurich. He has coauthored Living together: More-than-human ecologies for architectural thinking with Dr. Sonal Mithal and has presented his work at 2023 American Association of Geographers annual conference.