Award for a Master Project carried out at the LAST

The trend towards urban sprawl of the built environment in recent decades is incompatible with the search for long-term equilibrium underpinned by the principles of sustainability. In fact, urban sprawl not only requires the use of large amounts of land but also generates important environmental impacts, accompanied by socio-cultural disparities and higher infrastructural costs.

Given this fact, architectural design is expected to play a central role in the search for alternatives to redirect urban development inwards, to densify urban areas near public transport services and to generate sustainable construction methods.

In this respect, the master project developed by Micael Lopes and Antoine Vauthey focused on exploring the possibilities of valorizing the use of wood in urban areas. The proposal includes the raising and extension of an existing building and the establishment of two new apartment buildings in the Sévelin neighborhood of Lausanne. Going beyond this one particular case, it proposes a system potentially applicable for many other buildings, in the form of a wooden shell radiating around a concrete core.

The supervision group who followed this Master Project was constituted of Prof. Emmanuel Rey (supervisor), Prof. Jean-Louis Scartezzini (professor), Aleksis Dind (teaching assistant) and Prof. Pierre Bonnet (expert).