Content

The celebrated map of Rome engraved by Giovanni Battista Nolli in 1748 forms the basis of the graphic palimpsest on which, year after year and layer after layer, students at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne have accumulated the urban visions derived from Thomas More’s Utopia, Tommaso Campanella’s Civitas Solis, and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis. The architectures and places described in these three major works of Renaissance utopian literature provide the point of departure for a reflection on the relationship between text and image, and more specifically on the problematic and differentiated correspondence between literary descriptions of various possible ideal societies and contemporary visions and representations of the city.
        Rome, the composite, syncretic, and multifarious city par excellence, presents itself as a concrete field in which elements heterogeneous in material, form, and function find a precise inscription in space. Upon this topographic base unfolds a figurative promenade in which urban fragments drawn in plan are translated into views and accumulated as imaginary memories within a drawing cabinet. The spirit of utopian literature, visionary and abstract by nature, is thus adopted as the point of departure for constructing a possible image of the city. The method consists in translating texts into architectural figures, themselves composed from forms and fragments drawn from the repertoires of architectural history and pictorial art. These figures are then translated into images through the composition of perspectival views in the manner of plausible capricci.
        The first phase consists of a comparative reading of the three foundational works of the utopian genre. From Utopia, Civitas Solis, and New Atlantis are extracted the indications that orient the drawing: places, buildings, infrastructures, and constructed forms of collective life. The text thus becomes the principle of a figurative narrative.
        The second phase involves a construction by analogy. The descriptions of ideal cities are placed in relations of affinity with forms drawn from reality: plans, architectural types, fragments from treatises, and images from the figurative tradition. Analogy makes it possible to identify, within this repertoire, plausible figures capable of giving form to literary images and inscribing them within a recognizable, possible, and coherent urban structure.   
        The third phase concerns the level of metaphor and allegory. The architectures constructed in this way render visible an idea of the city and of society: the composition acquires a symbolic character in which each element participates in a broader discourse that exceeds its own meaning. Rome, through its stratified structure and the coexistence of heterogeneous parts, becomes the concrete model of a construction by fragments, in which form arises from the continuous accumulation of successive additions and the cyclical reconfiguration of what already exists.
    The drawing operation is defined through these three fundamental phases. The topographic plan of the built fabric and its monuments constitutes the support on which fragments are inserted, superimposed, and recomposed through techniques of collage and assemblage. Within this process, the relationship between urban morphology and architectural type emerges as a unifying principle: analogy and allegory determine the selection and meaning of forms, while practices of additive composition govern their disposition within the structure of the city.

        Finally, the reference to Giulio Carlo Argan’s Roma interrotta guides both the method and the operative approach. The archaeological nature of Rome demands, above all, a formal understanding in which fragmentation appears both as an essential condition of the contemporary city and as an instrument for confronting the possibility of its design. Giulio Carlo Argan observes that Rome becomes “interrupted” as soon as one ceases to imagine it and confines oneself to planning it. Hence the need for a reversal through which imagination makes it possible to conceive the city once again as a living and timeless repertoire upon which the act of design can and must be exercised anew.

Contributions :
Étudiants de Visions et Utopies 2018-2025

Commissaires d’exposition :
Reda Berrada, Nicola Braghieri, Filippo Cattapan, Filippo Fanciotti

Conception et réalisation :
Reda Berrada, Nicola Braghieri, François Burus, Filippo Cattapan, Filippo Fanciotti, Louis Fillistorf, Antoine Kientz, Cyril Mananga Matala-Tala

Remerciements :
EPFL – Invités aux discussions et conférenciers – Elisa Boeri, Giovanni Galli, Livia Lupi, Christoph Greffe, Giacomo Pala, Dirk Somers, Léa-Catherine Szacka
ENSASE – Soutien et coordination – Cédric Libert Jessica Auroux

Impression et supports graphiques :
Reprographie EPFL, Atelier Maquette

SAR - EPFL epfl.ch/labs/lapis
© 2026 EPFL - ENAC - SAR - IA - LAPIS

External Links
ENSASE Exhibitions
LAPIS Exhibitions

Content

This exhibition explores the vast field of graphic representation in architecture through fifteen years of teaching architectural representation at EPFL at the turn of the 2000s. It presents around a hundred paintings on wood, didactic works produced between 1997 and 2007 in the teaching units of the painter Arduino Cantàfora. They suggest a possible way of making, between thought and actio, where drawing and painting structure a concept and become an essential language for expressing the founding idea of a project. Despite the transition to digital technology, the exhibition conveys the conviction that the artisanal culture of drawing and painting continues to play a fundamental and indispensable role in training architects.
    Arduino Cantàfora, an architect, artist, set designer and writer from Milan, taught for over twenty years, from 1989 to 2011, at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, where he imparted the theory and techniques of drawing and art history to architecture students. He trained several generations of architects in the observation and representation of sensory reality, encouraging them to translate the shapes of the world into graphic and pictorial expressions. He is the author of hundreds of works preserved and exhibited in museums around the world. Among these, La città analoga (1973) became the manifesto and icon of an era in architecture.
The exhibition project was born out of the discovery of the pictorial works of Arduino Cantàfora’s students: around a hundred paintings on wood, carefully stored at the back of an EPFL building.
Human skeletons, beetles, steam locomotives, domestic interiors and, above all, around a hundred fragments of urban facades served as subjects for exercises in the art of drawing and painting.

Despite the transition to digital technology, the exhibition conveys the conviction that the artisanal culture of drawing and painting continues to play a fundamental and indispensable role in training architects.

Exhibition curatorship

LAPIS (Nicola Braghieri, Filippo Fanciotti, Emy Amstein)
Archizoom (Cyril Veillon, Dimitri Kasparian, Solène Hoffmann)

Contributions :

didactic works  (1997 - 2007) in the teaching units of Arduino Cantàfora
Nicola Braghieri (textes)
Filippo Fanciotti (image et textes)
Solène Hoffmann (photography)

External Links
Archizoom Exhibitions
LAPIS Exhibitions

Topic

In the figurative tradition of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in the Italian peninsula and Flanders, Mary’s house is configured as a spatial device intended to translate the Gospel text of the Annunciation into images. The “sacred house” thus becomes the place where the theological event is inscribed within architectural coordinates, through the search for a classical language and a perspectival order still in the process of definition.
The scene is modulated according to a dual register: tragic, in staging the solemnity of the Regina Caeli; comic, in conveying the humility of the Ancilla Domini. The canonical moments of the exegetical tradition — conturbatio, cogitatio, interrogatio, humiliatio, meritatio — unfold within the domestic space, which assumes the function of an eloquent “third character” in the sacred representation.

External Link

Mariae Domuncula
FIRE2/2025

Exercise

The exercise consists in producing a diptych composed of two plausible images based on a painting representing Mary’s room, as it was depicted through the eyes of artists working between Italy and Flanders in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Reconstruction – The first image will be a precise and plausible restitution of the painting, including a realistic interpretation of the elements that compose it (volumes, surfaces, and lighting), with the exception of human beings and other animals.
Recomposition – The second image will propose the composition of a new image, based on the given painting, by modifying the point of view (privileging that of the angel Gabriel) and, if appropriate, other characteristics such as perspective, lighting, and so forth. This new image will be conceived as an allegory of an idea of architecture.
The two images will correspond to the following proposition, which implies a narrative: an interior space containing an opening onto the outside and/or an opening onto the inside; that is, a threshold between interior and exterior, a snapshot poised between a before and an after. For this reason, if the first image does not frame an opening onto the outside world, such an opening must be made visible in the recomposition.

Content

In 1977, Italian director Dario Argento released Suspiria, a film destined to become a classic of the horror genre. Against the backdrop of the story of a young dancer confronted with an enchanted dance academy in postwar Berlin, Dario Argento transforms the Tanz Theatre Academy and its interior architecture from a mere setting into a genuine symbolic device capable of reinforcing and directing the narrative, poised between beauty and menace, order and chaos. The choice of 1970s Berlin allowed Dario Argento and production designer Giuseppe Bassan to draw upon a rich and eclectic architectural panorama.

On the set of Suspiria, references to German-inspired Art Deco and Art Nouveau are intensified by experimental geometries and a palette of vivid, dazzling colors reminiscent of the Technicolor employed by Disney, transforming their cheerful and lighthearted character into an amplifier of the darker disturbances of human nature.

The architecture and production design of Suspiria do not merely provide a backdrop for the unfolding story; they become genuine actors interacting with the plot and the characters. Through the symbolic use of line, geometric form, and color, as well as through the design of space and lighting, Dario Argento creates an environment that becomes a protagonist of the film in its own right, helping to construct a parallel reality in which the ordinary becomes extraordinary and the everyday turns threatening, in the wake of what Sigmund Freud termed “the uncanny.”

This fusion of architecture, decoration, and narrative makes Suspiria a unique work, in which every visual element contributes to the construction of a world that is at once fascinating and disturbing.

Within the framework of the Semaine Buissonnière, the sets and interiors of Suspiria become the object of an investigation into the relationship between environment and language, image and symbol, and, more generally, the dynamic dialogue between architecture and cinema. The workshop proposes to explore these themes through the analysis and reconstruction of selected spatial fragments from the film. With contributions from specialists in film history, representation, and architectural iconology, and under the supervision of the ENSASE teaching team, the workshop will be structured around:

1. a full screening of the film on Monday, February 2, at 4:30 p.m., at the Cinémathèque, 20–24 rue Jo-Gouttebarge, Saint-Étienne;
2. the analysis of eight architectural scenes from the film using tools derived from the iconological methods of art history;
3. the reconstruction of the image through the tools specific to the architectural discipline, namely perspective reconstruction and the production of plans and elevations;
4. the production of eight simulacrum-models in colored paper at a scale of 1:20;
5. the filming of the models using techniques specific to cinematographic recording.

The workshop is intended for thirty students, including four or five master’s-level students who may participate as assistants, thereby contributing to the construction of a collaborative and participatory educational project.

With the support of the reprographics workshop, the model-making workshop, and the IT and audiovisual services, which will provide lighting and cameras, the students will have access to the tools required for the production of drawings, the construction of the models, and the fabrication of their storage boxes. These objects may thus become useful instruments of cultural mediation within the framework of future collaborations with the Grand Lux cinema.

Teaching Team

Evelyne Chalaye – MCF TPCAU, ENSASE
Boris Hamzeian – MCFA HCA, ENSASE
Pierre-Albert Perrillat – Professor, TPCAU, ENSASE
Filippo Fanciotti – MCFA RA, LAPIS Laboratory, EPFL

External links

Semaine Buissonnière

Content

“As in Shining, architecture goes beyond bricks and mortar.”
    —David Lynch

“We built models for every hotel room. Because of the supernatural nature of the story, we did not want an expressionist set. (…) To ensure that these sets were entirely authentic, the prop department photographed everything needed to reproduce even the smallest details at scale. We then built the models, photographed them, lit them, and modified them according to the requirements of each scene. We avoided the cliché of the haunted hotel.”
    —Stanley Kubrick

The workshop focuses on the study of space and the reconstruction of the various “rooms” within the Overlook Hotel in Shining. Michel Chion describes Shining as “a horror film without darkness, without the slightest corner escaping the light.” Indeed, in a film conceived by Stanley Kubrick as “the most terrifying film in the world,” none of the expected “Gothic” devices appear: no chiaroscuro effects, no conventional scenery, and no visual artifice disrupts the clear perception of the spaces themselves.
On the contrary, primarily through extended tracking shots, the film emphasizes the hotel’s deserted spaces: its rooms with kitsch interiors, its vast and empty kitchens, and its endless corridors, whose floors are covered with improbable geometric patterns.
These spaces—rooms, corridors, halls, and elevators—are arranged according to a labyrinthine structure that cannot be represented by any coherent overall plan. The uncanny character of the Overlook Hotel’s interior form emerges precisely from this improbable geography, from the aberrant coherence of its spaces, and from the omnipresence of mirror-like environments.
As Sigmund Freud explains, the feeling of the uncanny—das Unheimliche—arises from something heimlich or heimisch, something familiar or homelike, that has undergone repression and subsequently returns. At the perceptual level, this feeling manifests itself through déjà vu. The Unheimlich, the uncanny, “is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and long-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.”

Objective

Cinema has played—and continues to play—a major role in the culture of images and in the formation of contemporary imaginaries. Cinematic images permeate our perception of lived space and shape our interpretation of reality. Through a scenographic displacement—a model-simulacrum inspired by a “classic” film—we propose a reflection on the visual representation of architecture.
The workshop seeks to make students aware of the profound connections between the spatial language of cinema and contemporary approaches to architecture.

Working Methods

• Screening and analysis of selected sequences from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980).
• Group analysis of the film, organized by sequence.
• Identification of “iconic” scenes depicting “empty spaces” that are particularly characteristic of the Overlook Hotel.
• Graphic reconstruction of the spatial configuration of selected scenes, based on film stills extracted from the film. This preparatory work, intended as the basis for a three-dimensional reconstruction, should convey the character and atmosphere of each sequence within its narrative context: its uncanny quality.
• Subsequent reconstruction through a model-simulacrum at a scale of 1:10, intended to “theatricalize” the sequence through the most “realistic” approach possible. The model should make it possible to produce a photographic image analogous to the original cinematic image. See, for comparison, the “illusionistic” photographs produced from models by the German artist Thomas Demand.

Teaching Team

Evelyne Chalaye – MCF TPCAU, ENSASE
Boris Hamzeian – MCFA HCA, ENSASE
Pierre-Albert Perrillat – Professor, TPCAU, ENSASE
Filippo Fanciotti – MCFA RA, LAPIS Laboratory, EPFL