Seminarweek HS 24: Living in Grisons

For there is no such thing as a first language in the Grisons, there is not one single-family house typology in the canton either. There are Engadiner houses in plastered stone, Prättigauer houses in layered wooden beams, and Bergeller houses in exposed masonry, but a Grisons house one fails to find. Varying from village to village, these houses often have more in common with their Roman, German, and Italian neighbours found on the other sides of the mountains, than with each other. They exist at the intersection of these borrowed building cultures, and should thus be studied within its environmental relations, rather than as autonomous objects.

Wandering villages, traversing valleys, and crossing passes, during the seminar week we documented these environmental relations, and traced the development of the single-family houses throughout history. By means of drawing, we examined relationships between building and topography, between dwelling and working, and between single units and infrastructure that connects them with its natural and/or urban environment. Specific architectural and technical elements of each house were studied in detail through historic research as well as on-site investigations, to ultimately arrive at an ecology of living in the Grisons.

This seminar week was organised in collaboration with the Chair of Architectural Behaviorology (Momoyo Kaijima).