Booklaunch Urban Legends Trieste

Studio Gay Menzel
EPFL ENAC SAR

For our 2nd year bachelor design studio of 2022-23 we chose the Mediterranean city of Trieste as a shared imaginary and point of reference. Located on the threshold between Western and Eastern Europe, it was an extremely cosmopolitan place where different identities came together and contributed to the sedimentation of multiple narratives. Austrians, Italians, Slovenes, Greeks, English, Armenians, Turkish and many more lived and worked together in this harbour town, which belonged to the Habsburg Austrian empire.
Travelling to Trieste gave us the opportunity to discover and to discuss the plural languages of architecture. For this we made the selection of 15 vestibules stemming from different architectural periods that shaped the city: Neoclassicism, Art Nouveau, Rationalism and Brutalism. Vestibules accumulate a panoply of architectural elements in a relatively small space (doors, floors, walls, stairs, etc). Their different articulations tell us about the spirit of the time they were conceived in – their reoccurrence of the permanence of architectural principles.

Urban Legends Trieste contains our surveys of these vestibules, which were composed as analytical drawings in the beginning of the academic year, combining plan, section, elevation and details on one single sheet. It also accumulates the rich output which grew out of these initial investigations: films, models, double exposures and finally architectural projects.

Through illustrations and texts, the publication not only gives insight into the particularities of Triestino culture but also documents our teaching methodology which we have been able to implement at EPFL for the past six years. Sudio GayMenzel’s approach perceives architectural intervention stemming from a site and a first desire, by defining its character in advance. We call it contextual imaginary.