DE/CONSTRUCTION
Stories of Applied Reuse
This project investigates how architectural structures and their materials can be reused, focusing on the ongoing transformation of a 1980s office building at Route de Meyrin 49 in Geneva into residential housing. Emphasizing large-scale circularity, the initiative prioritizes the retention and reintegration of existing structural and material elements. Over six days, MAIA students from HEAD engaged in hands-on, labor-intensive experimentation on-site, working within a partially dismantled first floor. Through processes of cataloguing, selective deconstruction, and material analysis, the building was approached as a layered archive to be read and reinterpreted. The project frames reuse as a deliberate and attentive practice, where acts of removal and intervention reveal latent spatial and material potentials.
Category: Workshop
Team: HEAD – Genève, Interior Architecture Department
Awards: Nominee, Swiss Arc Award, 2025
Category: Next Generation
© Martino De Grandis
Stories of Applied Reuse
This project investigates how architectural structures and their materials can be reused, focusing on the ongoing transformation of a 1980s office building at Route de Meyrin 49 in Geneva into residential housing. Emphasizing large-scale circularity, the initiative prioritizes the retention and reintegration of existing structural and material elements. Over six days, MAIA students from HEAD engaged in hands-on, labor-intensive experimentation on-site, working within a partially dismantled first floor. Through processes of cataloguing, selective deconstruction, and material analysis, the building was approached as a layered archive to be read and reinterpreted. The project frames reuse as a deliberate and attentive practice, where acts of removal and intervention reveal latent spatial and material potentials.
Category: Workshop
Team: HEAD – Genève, Interior Architecture Department
Awards: Nominee, Swiss Arc Award, 2025
Category: Next Generation
© Martino De Grandis
Geneva, 2025
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CLIMATIC VILLA
Climatic Villa explores the tensions between architectural heritage and the urgent demands of the global climate crisis, set in the historic Villa Romaine in Hyères. Once a site of leisure, the now-preserved but underused monument presents challenges of maintenance, uncertain future use, and limited adaptability due to its heritage status. In collaboration between HEAD – Genève and École Camondo Méditerranée, students engaged with speculative dystopian scenarios—including water scarcity, flooding, extreme heat, and air pollution—to develop full-scale interventions reimagining key spaces of the villa. The workshop critically explored how heritage structures might adapt to environmental and social pressures, proposing new tools, uses, and radical habitation typologies for their transformation.
Category: Workshop
Team: HEAD – Genève (Interior Architecture Department) | École Camondo
Awards: Nominee, Design Preis Schweiz, 2025
Category: Young Professionals
© Florian Puech
Climatic Villa explores the tensions between architectural heritage and the urgent demands of the global climate crisis, set in the historic Villa Romaine in Hyères. Once a site of leisure, the now-preserved but underused monument presents challenges of maintenance, uncertain future use, and limited adaptability due to its heritage status. In collaboration between HEAD – Genève and École Camondo Méditerranée, students engaged with speculative dystopian scenarios—including water scarcity, flooding, extreme heat, and air pollution—to develop full-scale interventions reimagining key spaces of the villa. The workshop critically explored how heritage structures might adapt to environmental and social pressures, proposing new tools, uses, and radical habitation typologies for their transformation.
Category: Workshop
Team: HEAD – Genève (Interior Architecture Department) | École Camondo
Awards: Nominee, Design Preis Schweiz, 2025
Category: Young Professionals
© Florian Puech
Hyères, 2024
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MANIFIESTO DE INTERIORES
Manifesto of Interiors explores contemporary architecture as the convergence of physical and mediated spaces, encompassing mass communication and digital platforms. While the Internet has accelerated the overlap of space and media in recent decades, this book traces the roots of this hybridization process back to the Renaissance and addresses interior spaces as a central laboratory in shaping modernity. Considering all forms of representation as inherently architectural—spanning from writing to photography, from drawing to cinema—the manifesto examines contemporary interiors as platforms of “expanded media” that simultaneously belong to different places and temporalities, whether physical or virtual, close or distant. It ultimately delves into recent phenomena, such as the rise of social media and the challenges posed by the Covid crisis, underscoring the pivotal role of interior architecture in defining today’s world.
Category: Book. Spanish
Author/s: Javier F. Contreras
ISBN: 978-84-124287-7-3
Awards: Selected, XVI BEAU (Bienal Española de Arquitectura y Urbanismo), 2023
© Gillaume Collignon
Manifesto of Interiors explores contemporary architecture as the convergence of physical and mediated spaces, encompassing mass communication and digital platforms. While the Internet has accelerated the overlap of space and media in recent decades, this book traces the roots of this hybridization process back to the Renaissance and addresses interior spaces as a central laboratory in shaping modernity. Considering all forms of representation as inherently architectural—spanning from writing to photography, from drawing to cinema—the manifesto examines contemporary interiors as platforms of “expanded media” that simultaneously belong to different places and temporalities, whether physical or virtual, close or distant. It ultimately delves into recent phenomena, such as the rise of social media and the challenges posed by the Covid crisis, underscoring the pivotal role of interior architecture in defining today’s world.
Category: Book. Spanish
Author/s: Javier F. Contreras
ISBN: 978-84-124287-7-3
Awards: Selected, XVI BEAU (Bienal Española de Arquitectura y Urbanismo), 2023
© Gillaume Collignon
(Barcelona: Puente Editores, 2022)
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PLAYING FIELDS
During the European Heritage Days in September 2022, different departments of HEAD – Genève collaborated to explore the history of the old Charmilles football stadium, a once-significant feature of the Geneva landscape, now replaced by Parc Hentsch. The Interior Architecture Department created a series of outdoor installations inspired by the stadium's elements. The overlay of the old football field's footprint on the current site formed a unique pitch, allowing for renewed games in the space, surrounded by stands. These installations, developed with students, aimed to rekindle the collective memory of the place in a contemporary and playful manner. Visitors were welcomed to participate in various activities, including a football tournament with unconventional rules that matched the unconventional pitch's geometry.
Category: Project. Built
Team: HEAD – Genève, Interior Architecture Department, with Journées Européennes du Patrimoine
Awards: Frame Awards, 2023
Category: Set Design of the Year
© Guillaume Collignon
During the European Heritage Days in September 2022, different departments of HEAD – Genève collaborated to explore the history of the old Charmilles football stadium, a once-significant feature of the Geneva landscape, now replaced by Parc Hentsch. The Interior Architecture Department created a series of outdoor installations inspired by the stadium's elements. The overlay of the old football field's footprint on the current site formed a unique pitch, allowing for renewed games in the space, surrounded by stands. These installations, developed with students, aimed to rekindle the collective memory of the place in a contemporary and playful manner. Visitors were welcomed to participate in various activities, including a football tournament with unconventional rules that matched the unconventional pitch's geometry.
Category: Project. Built
Team: HEAD – Genève, Interior Architecture Department, with Journées Européennes du Patrimoine
Awards: Frame Awards, 2023
Category: Set Design of the Year
© Guillaume Collignon
Geneva, 2022
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