Teaching the Preservation

A book that brings awareness to preservation in architecture.

This third TSAM volume presents content from teaching courses that have been developed at the EPFL for fifteen years. The aim is to promote preservation as a discipline, one of the main branches in the emerging field of socioecological transition.

Teaching the Preservation also demonstrates how the educational potential of preservation can be harnessed, uniting many social and scientific disciplines. It encompasses the history of architecture and architects, materiality and its constructed expression, the theory of architecture and design, and the examination—both abstract and concrete—of what surrounds us in every sense, from the teaspoon to the territory.

In short, what a minority of responsible architects has always concerned itself with: a silent and sometimes fragile architecture. These qualities should enable preservation to reform and reconstruct a new design process for architecture, which will in turn lead to a new kind of practice.