Ten years ago, EPFL's Laboratory of Urbanism proposed horizontality as a critical lens for urban theory and practice. Since then, the concept has grown substantially richer through theoretical traditions developed across Europe and beyond.
\r\nThis year's seminar revisits horizontality not as a closed paradigm, but as a mode of critical engagement with the socio-political, ecological, and economic processes of urbanization. It is approached as a historical, ideological, conceptual, and political question — one intersecting with territorial redistribution, accessibility, solidarity, and spatial justice amid deep socio-ecological transformation. Neither purely top-down nor bottom-up, horizontality invites reflection on spatial organization, territorial governance, and the conflicts shaping contemporary urbanization.
\r\nRather than repeating critiques of vertical power and growth-oriented urbanization, the seminar aims to pluralize perspectives on horizontality as an open concept — one capable of generating new rationalities and spatial imaginaries for future design and socio-political agendas.
An opportunity to celebrate the end of the year and share quantum research at EPFL with one another and the larger community. The event will include short lectures on topics in quantum for the general community, optional lab visits, and food and drinks!
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\r\nFull program and registration available in October
“To emphasize (...) dubious uses of risk is perverse, a dirty way of talking about a
\r\nclean scientific subject”
\r\nMary Douglas, Risk and Blame, 36.
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\r\nAs the baseline condition of so many territories shaped by extractive industries, administrative delay, and climatic instability, risk is prevalent. Yet ecological risk—pollution, fires, floods, heatwaves, droughts—is still presented as problems to be solved rather than conditions to be inhabited. This also speaks to an outsourcing of risk through externalized consequences of spatial injustice. Banks, developers, material supply chains, normative institutions, subcontracting hierarchies —all contend with calculated risk. This edition of Pressure Points asks us to unpack what it means to live with the risk, how it is managed, commodified, quantified, invented, politicized, instrumentalized, tamed, and to think, design, cohabitate intellectually and physically with it. The assembled guests should help us think and build literacy toward developing tools for living within uncertain territories and futures.
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\r\nSonia Seneviratne
\r\nMonday, October 26, 17:00 CET
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\r\nSonia Seneviratne is a Full Professor in Land-Climate Dynamics at ETH Zurich, with a focus on climate science and environmental physics. She conducts research on climate extremes such as droughts, land-climate processes, and human-induced climate change, based on climate modelling and data analyses. Listed among the Highly Cited Researchers of Web of Science (Clarivate) since 2014, she was a Coordinating Lead Author and Lead Author on several reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), including the Special Report on Extreme Events, the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C, and the Sixth Assessment Report in 2021. Seneviratne has received the Macelwane Medal of the American Geophysical Union in 2013 and the Hans-Oeschger Medal of the European Geosciences Union. Since July 2023, she serves as IPCC Working Group I Vice-Chair for the seventh assessment cycle (2023–2030). Her most recent contribution, published in June 2026, is the release of MESMER v1.0.0, an open-source climate model emulator she helped develop as part of her research group. It reproduces the spatial climate patterns of complex Earth System Models, including temperature and several climate-extreme indicators, making detailed climate information accessible to the wider research community.
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\r\nRIOT (Research and Innovation on Territory) is a laboratory engaged in pedagogy and research within the Institute of Architecture (ENAC) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology–EPFL, led by Charlotte Malterre-Barthes with Elif Erez, Flore Guichot, Jeremy Ratib, Summer Islam, Antoine Iweins, Kathy Kao, Nathalie Marj, Romain Dubetier-Grenier, Sylvie Clavel, and Saira Mohammed. Believing that the construction sector and design disciplines must pivot and wholeheartedly engage in the current social and climatic urgencies by rewiring themselves to face and repair the harm, RIOT utilizes tactics and strategies to decarbonize, decolonize, and depatriarchalize space production–by design.
\r\n
\r\n
“To emphasize (...) dubious uses of risk is perverse, a dirty way of talking about a
\r\nclean scientific subject”
\r\nMary Douglas, Risk and Blame, 36.
\r\n
\r\nAs the baseline condition of so many territories shaped by extractive industries, administrative delay, and climatic instability, risk is prevalent. Yet ecological risk—pollution, fires, floods, heatwaves, droughts—is still presented as problems to be solved rather than conditions to be inhabited. This also speaks to an outsourcing of risk through externalized consequences of spatial injustice. Banks, developers, material supply chains, normative institutions, subcontracting hierarchies —all contend with calculated risk. This edition of Pressure Points asks us to unpack what it means to live with the risk, how it is managed, commodified, quantified, invented, politicized, instrumentalized, tamed, and to think, design, cohabitate intellectually and physically with it. The assembled guests should help us think and build literacy toward developing tools for living within uncertain territories and futures.
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\r\nLiam Ross
\r\nTuesday, November 3, 17:00 CET
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\r\nLiam Ross is an architect and senior lecturer in Architectural Design at the University of Edinburgh, with a focus on building standardisation as a mode of architectural design, and in particular on fire-safety regulation. He also examines how those standards produce surprising side-effects as they are reinterpreted in practice. His book Pyrotechnic Cities: Architecture, Fire-Safety and Standardisation was published by Routledge in 2022, and describes the way that architectural design is an instrument of political agency.
\r\nHis work has been exhibited and published widely, including in Architectural Research Quarterly (arq), Arch+, and journalistic outlets such as Blueprint, Prospect, and Volume.
\r\nRoss has experience of practice in the UK and US, including a period of 5 years with Malcolm Fraser Architects, and maintains a relationship with professional practice as co-founder of ESALA Projects, a consultancy offering pro-bono and for-fee design services to public and third-sector clients. His most recent work, published in January 2026 in Architectural Research Quarterly, includes a co-authored article with Jon Goodbun entitled ‘Design and the extended building site: Ecologies of production and the production of ecologies’, which reframes the building site as an 'extended' socioecological system reaching across the global supply chains, material extraction, and labour that construction depends on, arguing that building is an ecological and political process rather than a purely material one.
\r\n
\r\nRIOT (Research and Innovation on Territory) is a laboratory engaged in pedagogy and research within the Institute of Architecture (ENAC) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology–EPFL, led by Charlotte Malterre-Barthes with Elif Erez, Flore Guichot, Jeremy Ratib, Summer Islam, Antoine Iweins, Kathy Kao, Nathalie Marj, Romain Dubetier-Grenier, Sylvie Clavel, and Saira Mohammed. Believing that the construction sector and design disciplines must pivot and wholeheartedly engage in the current social and climatic urgencies by rewiring themselves to face and repair the harm, RIOT utilizes tactics and strategies to decarbonize, decolonize, and depatriarchalize space production–by design.
\r\n
“To emphasize (...) dubious uses of risk is perverse, a dirty way of talking about a
\r\nclean scientific subject”
\r\nMary Douglas, Risk and Blame, 36.
\r\n
\r\nAs the baseline condition of so many territories shaped by extractive industries, administrative delay, and climatic instability, risk is prevalent. Yet ecological risk—pollution, fires, floods, heatwaves, droughts—is still presented as problems to be solved rather than conditions to be inhabited. This also speaks to an outsourcing of risk through externalized consequences of spatial injustice. Banks, developers, material supply chains, normative institutions, subcontracting hierarchies —all contend with calculated risk. This edition of Pressure Points asks us to unpack what it means to live with the risk, how it is managed, commodified, quantified, invented, politicized, instrumentalized, tamed, and to think, design, cohabitate intellectually and physically with it. The assembled guests should help us think and build literacy toward developing tools for living within uncertain territories and futures.
\r\n
\r\nJess Myers
\r\nMonday, November 16, 17:00 CET
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\r\nJess Myers is an urbanist whose practice includes work as an editor, writer, podcaster and curator, and is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Syracuse University. Previously, Myers was an assistant professor of architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. She has worked as an archivist, translator and analyst in New York and Paris. Myers served as a co-steward of the Architecture Lobby’s New York chapter and as the series editor for SEIU’s book series, Taking Freedom. Her research takes many forms, including a variety of multimedia platforms, which she uses to explore politics and residency in urban conditions. Myers’ podcast, Here There Be Dragons focuses on the intersection of identity politics and security policy in public space through the eyes of New Yorkers, Parisians and Stockholmers. Myers’ work has been published in The Architect’s Newspaper, Log, The Funambulist Magazine, Failed Architecture, Avery Review, Dwell and l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui. Her most recent exhibition, “A Pause Is Not A Break,“ was exhibited widely, including at the Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Iowa and Carleton University.
\r\n
\r\nRIOT (Research and Innovation on Territory) is a laboratory engaged in pedagogy and research within the Institute of Architecture (ENAC) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology–EPFL, led by Charlotte Malterre-Barthes with Elif Erez, Flore Guichot, Jeremy Ratib, Summer Islam, Antoine Iweins, Kathy Kao, Nathalie Marj, Romain Dubetier-Grenier, Sylvie Clavel, and Saira Mohammed. Believing that the construction sector and design disciplines must pivot and wholeheartedly engage in the current social and climatic urgencies by rewiring themselves to face and repair the harm, RIOT utilizes tactics and strategies to decarbonize, decolonize, and depatriarchalize space production–by design.
\r\n
Components, measurements, wiring, and first circuit builds: everything you need to quickly go from idea to circuit!
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\r\nLearn to see your mechanical projects through to completion.