Phd student Marcela Aragüez to exhibit in international exhibition in Switzerland

Bartlett School of Architecture Phd student Marcela Aragüez will exhibit her research on the Rolex Learning Centre in the international exhibition CH-JP: Building in Context from 15 September to 1 October in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, having been previously displayed in the Pavilion Sicli in Geneva in June.

Organised with the support of the Geneva University of Art and Design and in cooperation with the Maison d’Architecture Geneva and the Consulate of Japan in Geneva, the exhibition commemorates the 150th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Switzerland and Japan. It will depict a series of sketches, models and critical research of projects built in Switzerland and designed by Japanese architects, such as SANAA and Kengo Kuma.

Developed under the supervision of The Bartlett's Dr Sophia Psarra, Aragüez’s research was awarded the UCL Turner Prize for Best Dissertation on the MSc Spatial Design: Architecture and Cities. The study analyses the spatial system and social patterns observed at the Rolex Learning Centre, whose geometry is characterised by its undulated floor and ceiling. The building required the development of innovative tools and the customization of current syntactic methodologies in order to address an unconventional building morphology.Aragüez’s current Phd research, supervised by Dr Sophia Psarra and Professor Murray Fraser, addresses practices of indeterminacy, open-endedness and incompleteness as design tools in the architecture of the post-war period in Britain and Japan, focusing on the work of Cedric Price and Arata Isozaki respectively. The research has been recently awarded with the Sasakawa Foundation Studentship.

More information:

• For more information about the exhibition please visit archizoom.epfl.ch/BuildinginContext