ETHZ/EPFL Summer School 2025 Movement Matters: Exploring Transitions in Architecture Research

In Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie writes, “We are all migrants from a country called the past” (Rushdie, 1992). Rushdie suggests that the movement and transitions we experience are not only spatial but also temporal. The summer school aims to explore the fluidic nature of belonging, identity, and architectural materials which are central concepts in placemaking. The Summer School invites the participants to consider architecture as a dynamic process shaped by movement and transitions across human and non-human actors
instead of static constructs. We aim to highlight movement as both a source and a method in architecture research. We look at movement through three lenses: a) movement in identity and socio-cultural behaviour b) movement of artifacts like waste, building materials as a technological questions and c) movement of more-than-human elements like land, water, flora and fauna in relation to environmental questions. 

The first part borrows the conceptual framework of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming and looks at the contingent relationship between migration, cultural identity and placemaking. Participants will be invited to reflect on positionality and situated knowledges in architecture research, exploring how their subjectivities, shaped by migrations across socio-cultural landscapes, influence and inform their individual research methods. The second part of the summer school will focus on the agency of movement in the making of urban landscapes. Participants will reflect on the ways material artifacts are entangled with questions of technology and science, through movement. How do materials influence notions of infrastructure and forms of power? Finally, controlling natural resource flows was central to empire expansion, shaping both landscapes and political contexts. Thus, the last part centers the environmental elements to understand how movement of non-human entities and actors shape human systems. Participants will explore how these more-than-human flows intersect with human infrastructures, and how this entanglement continues to shape contemporary urban and
rural landscapes.

The Summer School invites participants to take part in four workshops and three guest lectures that explore the above-mentioned topological modalities of movement. The Summer School initiates a conversation about privileging movement as a method in architecture research. We envision a non-hierarchical peer-to-peer working environment where participants bring their methodological strengths, such as writing, drawing, photography, or performative practices and advance their own research and practice looking through the lens of movement and transitions.