These ‘little sexy buildings that are not encumbered by plumbing issues’ experiment with styles, know-how, and theories. Grouped within a common landscape, follies express possible elsewhere. Their occupants rejoice in fleeting identities: short-lived hermits in huts, nomads under immobile tents, conquerors on the gazebo, animated by the promises of the temple of love.

In response to the fragile ecology of our world, which seeks to establish a balanced relationship with its resources and environment, the follies formulate architecture and landscape as an inseparable culture. The forward-looking enthusiasm for designing and building follies allows us to escape, for a while, from the turpitudes of the world and formalize ways of inhabiting it.

The 2024 MAIA Graduate Show invites visitors to delve into the intricate interplay between the natural, artificial, and digital realms within the contemporary built environment. The exhibition explores both the responses to contemporary environmental and societal challenges (carbon footprint, circular economy, etc.) and the implications of new ecological paradigms (post-human, more-than-human, etc.) for interior architecture. The interpretation of this theme was intentionally left open for students, resulting in projects that address environmentally responsible construction, ecology, reuse, energy efficiency, social and political urgencies, as well as novel materials and technologies.

The show displays a diverse range of projects in terms of scale, typology, location, and complexity. These include the Marie Schild’s forward-looking reflection on the future ruins of contemporary ski lifts when the snow runs out, a luminous investigation of Geneva’s night-time spaces by Ségolène Davister, a journey through public spaces in Italy by Valentina Pantalena, a complete interior redesign of an outpatient unit in Vienna by Vilma Hubalek, Alexandra Miskufova’s delicate look at her grandmother through the weaving together of yesterday and tomorrow, Patris Sallaku’s invention of a new type of thermal bath based around lavender on the banks of the Rhone, an ambitious re-reading of a Swiss novel by Andreas Laskaris, a typological study of a new type of apartment block in the Grottes district of Geneva by Marie Torrione and, finally, the art of coming to terms with the leftovers and other remnants of wood from our forests, conceived and interpreted by Anais Youssefi.