station.plus (s+) is a teaching and research platform at the Institute for Design at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich. It started in 2017 and is rooted in the collaborative film series Legislating Architecture, The Property Drama and Architecting after Politics (Brandlhuber+ Olaf Grawert and Christopher Roth, 2016 – 2018). These films explored the potential of film and storytelling to popularize discourses on themes, that shape architecture (from theory to practice). Building on this notion, s+ started as an architecture TV station. The idea was to further explore the potential of video and film as design tools for another kind of form-making: beyond the built object, between fact and fiction, in space and time.
Conventional concepts of architecture are countered with proposals that challenge the underlying systematics that limit collective and individual imagining: in need of new starting points that allow to imagine alternative ways of designing the world. s+ aims at overcoming a retroactive architectural practice that only afterwards, legitimizes its formal decisions through fabricated tales. Instead, s+ seeks to unlock the power of speculative architecting. Through embedding narratives the focus of design shifts from the object and its manifestation, to the argument behind it.
Or, as Christopher Roth said: "Don’t complain. Design a strong argument. Compress the argument. If it does not survive compression, it is not a good argument. That is how we make TV."
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