“I've always been fascinated with how the body moves through space”

When Ada Massarente was 18 years old, she dreamed of becoming a choreographer. “I’ve always been fascinated with how the body moves through space,” she explains. A former pupil of La Scala Academy Ballet School in Milan and Ecole Nationale de Danse de Marseille, she has a wealth of experience in classical ballet and contemporary dance, as well as being a classically trained pianist. Realizing that she was too young to embark on a career in choreography, Massarente, who hails from Italy, decided to attend university. But she wavered between fine arts and theater.

“I had a list of 10 schools to choose from,” recalls Massarente. “All I needed was one. My parents, who are architects like my grandfather, suggested I consider architecture as an option. But I’d always said I’d never go into the same line of work as them.” A decisive meeting with a professor at Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Lyon changed her mind. “It was a revelation,” she says with a sense of enduring emotion. “We spoke the same language. I literally fell in love with the subject.” For Massarente, studying architecture allowed her continue indulging her passion for body movement. Only this time, she put her expertise to work for urban communities: her master’s project – one of the best in her year – focused on the banks of the Veveyse river, with the goal of creating spaces that local residents could use on a daily basis.

Filming and drawing movement
Before joining EPFL, Massarente obtained a bachelor’s degree from the National School of Architecture of Paris-Belleville (ENSA-PB), where the teaching takes a humanities-oriented approach. She then moved to Switzerland for her master’s degree, drawn to EPFL because of the many career pathways it offers. She has since graduated and works as a project assistant at the School alongside her job at an architecture firm in Geneva.

My sketches represented my body, but they also spoke more broadly about notions of space. The way we move is influenced by sounds, surfaces and air temperature.

While at EPFL, three professors from the architecture department – Paola Viganò, Pier Vittorio Aureli and Sophie Delhay – encouraged her to pursue her interest in staging movement, which would eventually become the focus of her master’s project. Honing this vast subject down to a workable research topic required a great deal of study and experimentation. Massarente began by delving into the history of choreography and scenography, focusing in particular on the performance of ordinary body movements. She then put her research into practice: in the bedroom of her Lausanne flatshare, she set up a small stage using her window curtains as scenery and filmed her improvised performances. She then watched her recordings and drew her movements. She repeated this process several times, gaining a clearer understanding of the very principle of performance whereby those involved serve as both spectator and actor.

“My sketches represented my body, but they also spoke more broadly about notions of space,” explains Massarente. “The way we move is influenced by sounds, surfaces and air temperature.” This revelation led to the second part of her project, in which she considered the relationship between the body and the landscape. She chose the Veveyse as her stage: “It’s a drainage basin close to my home, with steep topography and fast-flowing water. My aim was to use the river’s movement as a backdrop for the movement of the body in an urban environment.” Specifically, Massarente suggested redeveloping the river bank between the Gilamont Viaduct in Corsier-sur-Vevey and the lakeshore where the Fête des Vignerons winegrowers’ festival is held.

Urban waterfront theaters
To explore the relationship between her body and the water, Massarente repeated the exercise she’d carried out in her student bedroom: she visited different locations along the river, filmed her movements and drew them. For one series of sketches, Massarente allowed the river to serve as her guide. She mapped out walks from the vineyards down to the lakeshore and suggested transforming the former delta – now canalized like most Swiss rivers – into a park. Her physical exploration of the Veveyse also prompted her to recommend building seven urban stages along its banks. “These stages would serve as new performance venues, like outdoor theaters,” she explains. “People would be free to use them as they wished. The idea is to revive the tradition of the Fête des Vignerons parade.” Residents could use these spaces to move around, sit down or simply dip their toes in the water.

For Massarente, the social and green transition is changing the nature of architectural practice: “These days, the profession isn’t just about designing buildings. Architects have to consider a whole range of factors, including a building’s relationship with the surrounding space. For me, architecture and landscape design are two sides of the same coin.”