Lehrcanapé is a participatory teaching format at D-ARCH. It is linked to a lecture class on the History of contemporary Art and Architecture. The students themselves contribute to its content and structure. On weekly excursions with guests, students use the ETH environment as a test site for their own ideas.
Lehrcanapé is an open teaching format offered by the Chair for the History of Art and Architecture. It uses the ETH Enviroment and other spaces of contemporary cultural production as test sites and it invites students to participate in decisions about the course’s content and structure. Thereby, the Lehrcanapé serves as a sensorium for the students› current concerns and questions. At the same time it opens up entry-points for the third year students to engage with the discourses, practices and sites of contemporary culture.
Specific professional competences are being developed collectively in the course of each Lehrcanapé session by departing from the participants› and guests› current projects. Performative and explorative actions as well as discussion formats and group building methods are oriented towards actual requirements of the profession of architecture today. This includes a spectrum of new fields of practice on the intersections to research, the arts or to political engagement. Accordingly, the Lehrcanapé – together with invited artists and architects – puts to the test a range of proactive, performative and cooperative forms of practice. Thereby, the Lehrcanapé also provides access to new fields of research and promotes and encourages students to become independent designers and intellectual personalities. The Lehrcanapé gained public recognition and visibility with its contribution to the Bienniale di Venezia in 2014 as well as with the participation of a group of Lehrcanapé students in the Manifesta 11 in Zurich in 2016.
