PHD METHODOLOGICAL SEMINARS
"parcellaire palimpsest", © Guillaume Vanneste
INITIATIVES
International PhD Seminar (2017)
The Seminar aimed to discuss the actuality and the problems related to Comparison as a Scientific Method and its heuristic efficiency, while focusing on its devices, purposes and challenges. From the thematic point of view, the students have been encouraged to position their contribution in relation to two ways (specific to the Comparative Approach) of orienting the play between differences and similarities: a) the Idiographic Approach (tendency to specify) where the comparative effort is directed towards understand the meaning of contingent, unique, and often cultural or subjective phenomena – typical of the Humanities; b) the Nomothetic Approach
(tendency to generalize) where the comparative effort is directed towards the derivation of laws that explain types in general, where the pursuit of recurrences among different contexts is taken as a sign and proof of the same phenomenon – typical of the Natural Sciences.
The seminar was organized by the Laboratory of Urbanism EPFL , HRC EPFL, Institute for Geography and Sustainability UNIL in the frame of Swissuniversities Program for the Doctoral Program of Architecture and Sciences of the City EDAR EPFL.
International PhD Seminar (2018)
The Seminar aimed at discussing the operation
of “mapping palimpsests”, its tradition and future developments, as a scientific and methodological question. From the thematic point of view, the
three categories of permanence, persistence and disappearance could be seen as clues of today’s discourses about preservation, recycling and demolition processes. Within this framework, this Call welcomed papers reflecting on the chronological interconnections between: the history of the territory, construction, materials, processes, practices; the cultural heritage
(both built and unbuilt); dynamics of mobility, energy, air, hydrology; evolution of land use or land cover (soil and subsoil); territorial infrastructures (visible and invisible). The understanding of the “territory as palimpsest” and the related cartographies inspired by it are today part of the renewed systemic and metabolic approaches to territorial phenomena, paradigms that broaden and open new opportunities for a redefinition of the notion of palimpsest as a lens through which to cope with contemporary challenges.
International PhD Seminar (2019)
The Phd Seminar “Invention of Carouge, Fifty Years after” was organized on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the book by Swiss historian of art, architecture and urbanism André Corboz that was published in 1968. Focused on the study of the new town of Carouge
(planned and built by the Savoyard state in the 18th century near Geneva and later incorporated as a borough of the latter), “the invention of Carouge”, was an ambitious attempt to combine a historical case study, urban analysis and planning theory. The topic of the book also represented a vector of cultural exchange between Turin and Switzerland in the following years, most notably on the occasion of the exhibition on Carouge organized by Turin’s State Archives in the mid-1980s.
