“Time as material”
A building decays and needs care to fight against time and the environment in an attempt to stay preserved or be restored to its original state. Architects obsession are often with securing performance, guarantying no changes to the design. On the contrary, the garden around the building grows, adapts. Humidity, sunlight, bacteria, fungi and fauna are kept in a healthy balance and contribute to the development of a garden or a park which benefit consequently from and to a larger eco-system. There is no inside and outside anymore.
Charlotte Truwant is an architect and scientific assistant at ETHZ. She graduated from the Swiss federal institute of technology EPFL in 2006 . In 2013, she joined the faculty of Professor Harry Gugger at EPFL as a research assistant. There she was responsible for the publications “laba lessons” and research on environmental contextualism. In 2019, she joined the chair of Prof. Theriot at ETHZ. The framework of ETHZ allows her to deepen questions of territorial and social transformation by addressing the project scale through questions of economy, durability and performance.
In 2017 she co-founded together with Dries Rodet the architecture practice Truwant + Rodet + . The background of the two funding partners shaped by various international experiences in Switzerland, Belgium, Rotterdam, Copenhagen, Brussel, and a residency in Japan re-enforced their curiosity and interest for broader fields of investigation such as scenography, landscape urbanism, exhibition, installation, furniture design, research and education. In 2017, they were awarded the Swiss Art Award for their project ‘A Pavilion’. Since 2018 they are developing the project ‘Fountain of Youth’ together with Fabian Marti for the Campus Santé in Lausanne. In 2019 they were part of the cross disciplinary research and design team to develop new tools and methodologies for the Dhaka Art Summit, an environmental approach towards exhibiting. In 2020 The office won the competition for the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris.
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