Our academic experience shares a common working method with our studio: drawing by hand as a means of making mental progress in full view of other people. In this sense, school desks are similar to our studio tables, where drawing is a tool that allows doubt to enter, that makes visible the difficulties of moving forward; at the same time, this method enables progress, precisely because these difficulties are on view.

We like to consider the rooms of our office and the ones at school as equivalent spaces where to discuss the problems that appear with the projects, trying to move from the tables of the office to that ones of the classroom in continuity, as if it was about continuous reflections with different interlocutors. The themes of the exercises, therefore, are always linked to our own concerns about city and the built fabric.

The design studio at ETH Zurich is focused on the two main subjects that in our opinion the architect encounters as a challenge today: Rehabilitation and Social Housing. We bring these themes to the school, as we believe that it is in there that the experimentation and research about new ways of living and about how to deal with the built fabric have to be developed. The cities of Barcelona and Zurich are the fields to reflect and study these problems, working at all the different scales that they affect, from the neighbours and the community to the private domain and the definition of the personal living spaces.