Autor: Studio Tom Emerson
Studio Tom Emerson is a design and research studio in the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich led by Professor Tom Emerson, co-founder of 6a architects in London focusing on re-use and bricolage in architecture and the narrative of history.
Since 2010 Studio Tom Emerson has undertaken a series of collective projects exploring the architectural potential of re-use and bricolage in full scale construction projects designed and built by the students and large scale surveys of post-industrial European cities; Forst (2011) on the German Polish border, Galway (2012) on the west coast of Ireland and Glasgow (2014).
The studio started with 96 hands in September 2010, as a two week primer for the design studio. We have continued to make these small structures alongside research into territorial re-use. Re-use is not an alternative to the new. It is a new reality. Every piece of land has been occupied or inhabited. New buildings are simply another way of re-using the land.
These two sets of projects present a similar story at opposite scales; from material to the city. If the re-use of materials gives us, what Claude Lévi-Strauss called a pre-constrained set, then the survey offers its own set, from the narrative of history and use.
Catalogues of Atlases of Forst and Galway were published in 2012 and including essays by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Arno Brandlhuber, Tom Emerson, Shelley McNamara, Tom de Paor, Philip Ursprung and Elia Zenghelis.
In 2016 the Glasgow Atlas was exhibited and published at Glasgow International 2016, the city’s biennale of contemporary art. The Pavilion of Reflections for Manifesta 11 Zurich, is the largest of most complex student-led project to date.