A L IN

In recent years, we have developed our own toolshed through our first projects in Switzerland and Hong Kong. The various tools and formats we have designed function as interfaces. They enable us to work with and bring into dialogue different communities, practices, situated social and ecological issues, and the historical dynamics of places in order to read the violence of the spatial dynamics at work, ask better questions and develop collective visions. With our work, we aim to strengthen the power to act and inhabit of the different actors contributing to these processes by weaving a collective and simultaneous transformation of the spatial, the legal and the imaginary, starting with new shared gestures and attentions.

Architecture Land Initiative is a cooperative. We initiate and carry out political action in the form of projects on landscape, public space and architecture. Currently living and working in Geneva, Zurich and Hong Kong, our members engage in diverse activities across research and design. As a cooperative, we are a common-benefit platform and not profit-oriented.

We deeply believe in collaborative practices and focus on projects with commons at their core. Acknowledging the urgency of planetary ecological and political crises, we seek to navigate conflicts and contradictions with care towards life. We strive to act towards non-exploitive economies and ecologies by exploring, imagining and supporting alternative forms of coexistence.

As spatial practitioners aware of the reproduction of normative schemes, we are committed to re-question the foundations of our disciplines, starting with our own interactions and tools. For each project, we assemble a situated, trans-scalar set of instruments with the aim of supporting oblique readings, hybridizations and collective re-articulations of knowledge and visions.

The cooperative operates as a flexible infrastructure, consisting of a cooperative legal framework, a communication structure for collective work, a series of studios, as well as a set of tools and expertise that we grow collectively. This open structure enables us to create a shared space for continuous experimentation between research and practice.

Currently led by Andreas Schrämli, Aurélie Dupuis, Dieter Dietz, Guillaume Othenin-Girard, Joshua Guiness, Kent Mundle, Léonore Nemec, Alexa den Hartog (PO4), and Zoé Lefèvre.

Andreas Schrämli

Andreas Schrämli (CH, 1958) is a practitioner and a visionary. As a trained carpenter and set designer for various films, he combines his practical knowledge and experience to find creative solutions. He co-founded the Stahl- & Traumfabrik AG in Schlieren, which he envisions as a think- and experiment factory in which carpenters, metalworkers, architects and makers work on individual projects and interdisciplinary collaborations. Spanning from execution to financial aspects, he works on concepts that are supported by many. As a founding member of Architecture Land Initiative, he embraces hands-on responsibility and commits himself to a high degree of transparency. He is based in Zurich (GMT+1).

Aurélie Dupuis

Aurélie Dupuis (CH, 1989) is an architect, teacher and researcher, currently a doctoral student at EPF Lausanne. She is also a founding member of Architecture Land Initiative. In her research, at the intersection of architecture and performance arts and studies, she explores the unspoken violence that arises from the limited understandings of the politics of body, movement and co-presence in Western architectural and spatial theory and practices and how this reductive pattern has been integrated into the history of the discipline. She thinks alongside architectural/spatial practices and performance arts as they relate to the collective imagination of alternative futurities. She is based in Geneva (GMT+1).

Dieter Dietz

Dieter Dietz (CH, 1964) is an architect, educator, and researcher, presently heading the architecture section at EPF Lausanne. As a founding member of Architecture Land Initiative and director of the ALICE laboratory at EPFL, Dieter envisions architectural practice as a collective action and architecture as a transformative tool for spatial, societal, and political change. Recognizing the essential nature of knowledge transfer among the realms of practice, research, and expertise, he views projects as key instruments in this exchange. Dieter believes that the mission of architecture and urbanism is to evolve as transformative disciplines within the crucial ecological transition for life on Earth. He is based in Zurich (GMT+1).

Guillaume Othenin-Girard

Guillaume Othenin-Girard (CH, 1986) is an architect and an assistant professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong. He is also a founding member of Architecture Land Initiative. His teaching research focuses on the cross-disciplinary potential between archaeology and architecture. He is currently developing an interpretive planning strategy for Armenia’s Vedi River Valley. Guillaume is interested in how the transformative agency of drawing carries the potential to maximise breadth of participation throughout the stages of planning, designing and building a vision that considers the landscape as a source of heritage in itself. He is based in Hong Kong (GMT+8).

Joshua Guiness

Joshua Guiness (DE, 1994) is an architect whose main interests lie in urban transformation processes, spatial strategy, and theory. Educated at the University of the Arts in Berlin as well as ETH in Zurich, he joined Architecture Land Initiative in 2022, working primarily on the refurbishment and extension of a former industrial site in Schlieren on the outskirts of Zurich. Joshua is also a teaching and research assistant at VOLUPTAS, a speculative design studio at ETH Zurich. He is currently interested in modes of expanding architectural and spatial thought to the development of strategies for policy, culture, and society at large. ‍He is based in Zurich (GMT+1).

Kent Mundle

Kent Mundle (CA, 1993) is a designer and lecturer in the Department of Architecture at The University of Hong Kong. There, he researches within the Rural Urban Lab, which is an initiative that focuses on researching and developing forms of affordable housing and community infrastructure for rapidly urbanising territories in developing economies. Kent’s work focuses on integrating emerging forms of housing types and emerging financial mechanisms to deliver housing in these areas in a post-welfare state context. As a part of Architecture Land Initiative, Kent is leading an initiative in Hong Kong to reintroduce new forms of cooperative housing. He is based in Hong Kong (GMT+8).

Léonore Nemec

Léonore Nemec (CH, 1988) is an architect active in collaborative projects with her own office Studio Nemec and Architecture Land Initiative. She has been working at Herzog and de Meuron and is currently working as a research assistant at EPFL. Her interest in architecture and territory planning is primarily in their political and social dimensions. She believes that experimentation in spatial design is essential for a lasting engagement with the changing spaces - material, normative, ideological - of our societies. She is interested in the application of innovative research-based practices to concrete projects, from conception to completion. She is based in Geneva (GMT+1).

Alexa den Hartog

Alexa den Hartog (PO4) (CH, 1986) studied architecture in Lausanne, in Copenhagen and at ETH Zurich. After gaining professional experiences in Basel, Zurich and Tokyo, she has been running the architecture firm PO4 seiler + den hartog architekten with her partner Yves Seiler since 2015. Their office is a co-founder of Architecture Land Initiative. Alexa is interested in the duality between the theoretical conception of architecture and its realisation. For her, architecture is a built form of political ideas and must therefore be treated with empathy at its core. Next to her design practice she is involved in teaching and professional organisations. She is based in Zurich (GMT+1).

Zoé Lefèvre

Zoé Lefèvre (FR, 1993) is an architect and a member of Architecture Land Initiative. Her interests lie at the intersection of design, art, and politics, where she employs overlooked narratives and methods to explore issues connected to the built environment. In 2022, she gained valuable experience as a teaching assistant at Superstudio Latent Futures, a prospective design studio at EPF Lausanne, engaging in interdisciplinary approaches at the intersection of architecture and the performing arts. In 2023, she actively participated in the Performing Landscape project, applying her expertise in cartography and spatial storytelling. She is based in Geneva (GMT+1).

Former members

Agathe Mignon, Darío Negueruela del Castillo, Aurèle Pulfer.

Past collaborators

Julien Heil, Janice Leung, Hibiki Masaki, Manon Pinget.

Website

Giulia Polenta