EPFL projects awarded with the SIA Master of Architecture prize

SIA Architecture Masters Prize

This prize, awarded jointly by the SIA's Professional Group Architecture (BGA) and the Swiss Architecture Council, recognises the best master's projects in the field of architecture throughout Switzerland. All projects completed in the Fall semester of 2023 or the Spring semester of 2024 have been considered for this year's selection. The schools themselves make the nominations, while an independent jury awards the prizes to eight projects. The prize is worth a total of CHF 14,000.

The winning projects, including two contributions from EPFL on the conversion of former industrial buildings, illustrate the full scope of the architectural profession and augur well for the future of young architects.

The jury deliberations took place on 3 and 4 October 2024 at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Winterthur. The members of the 2024 jury were: Olga Cobuscean, Søren Linhart, Andreas Haug, Thomas Pulver, Anne Kaestle, Guillaume Henry, Elena Fontana and Barbara Thüler.

Jury report

Meryl Barthe, Noémie Perregaux-Dielf, « DIS/ ASSEMBLE: a monument to progressive deconstruction »
directed by Sarah Nichols and Amy Perkins

DIS/ ASSEMBLE investigates the obsolete Chavalon power plant as what is commonly referred to as a Negative Common – a negative resource our generation will inherit. The project’s priority is to offer a vision highlighting our shared responsibility for the site; by proposing its progressive dismantling, re-use and care. Being about process and interactions, a sensible itinerary for its end-of-life is organised with a gradual return to nature, as promised at its time of construction in 1965. The site opens to the public, sanitation and deconstruction begin and the main vacant building is transformed into a re-use center processing and storing the material on site. In this operation, the moment of the boiler’s dismantling leaves the facade of the re-use center open. It makes room for an architectural gesture: a temporary facade in re-used steel that becomes the mediator between the worksite and the public. A monument to deconstruction and visual indicator of the unmaking, remaking, and maintenance of the growing parc.

Enzo Migliano, « Habiter la Grande Profondeur – reconversion de l’Entrepôt pour Tabac d’Orient, Boncourt (JU) »
sous la direction de Marco Bakker et Alexandre Blanc

The remnants of the industrial era constitute a commendable raw material for the production of collective housing as an alternative to urban sprawl. Faced with very thick right-of-ways (often well over 16 metres), such an exercise reconsiders the usual domestic depth. The theoretical statement, the game of depth, explored the limit state of the standard and offered projectual tools for apprehending it. On the French-Swiss border, the Jura village of Boncourt is orphaned from the industry that brought it two centuries of prosperity following the relocation of cigar manufacturer British American Tobacco. The Entrepôt pour Tabac d'Orient, designed by the Basel architects Suter & Suter (1965), rises abruptly in the heart of the village, in a bar measuring approximately 200 by 27 metres, bordering the Allaine. The project recognises the constructive qualities of the ensemble and preserves its structural integrity, while piercing the least stressed areas. The building forms a new urban piece and establishes a porous relationship with its context by hosting a mix of public programmes that energise the site. In particular, a public bath is finely inserted between the foundations. An open-air alleyway runs the length of the warehouse like a fault line, respecting its original centred distribution and creating two new introverted façades. The complex interweaving of volumes creates a typological variety in which each dwelling has a walk-through aspect and takes full advantage of the east-west orientation.