ULTIMATE MATTER
Opening, Monday 26 September 2022, 6 p.m.
Archizoom, SG building, Place Ada Lovelace, EPFL
Lucile Ado and Oscar Buson, founders of the urban planning and architecture agency Raum404, inaugurate the autumn semester with an opening lecture of the exhibition Ultimate Matter, which they curate with Archizoom: Solène Hoffmann and Cyril Veillon.
Through this exhibition, Raum404 highlights the ultimate stage of matter. This is how it identifies the residues of our society’s everyday consumer goods, after having undergone the processes of recycling and valorization. Through a fine mapping work and the support of satellite images, Raum404 gives an unprecedented insight into the impact of waste movements in the Swiss territory. The agency thus makes the concept of the Anthropocene tangible and informs us about the current geological epoch in which the force of transformation of the environment is exerted by the human species.
In a context of dependence and scarcity of fossil fuels and supported by recent projects, Raum404 opens tracks for an urbanism and an architecture conscious of the finitude of the world.
The agency
Raum404 is an urban planning and architecture agency based in Zurich and Chippis. Its committed and multidisciplinary work focuses on issues of territorial reconfiguration, with a focus on the networking of natural forces at different planning scales. Recently Raum404 has led two prospective studies on the ecological transition of very large cross-border territories (Consultation du Grand Genève and Luxembourg in transition). At the architectural scale, the agency is deepening the questions of sustainable design by a fine work of typology of public equipment and housing, currently in realization. It is currently developing the principles of an architecture of consciousness, which is based on non-radicality and on renewable energy networks. Raum404 was founded by Oscar Buson in 2013. Lucile Ado joined it in 2020. They have won international competitions including two Europans and participate in juries and academic conferences including at Loyola in Rome and the University of Chicago.