Paper Covers Rock focused on the project as something that is nestled between two realities: on the one hand, paper, i.e. speculative blueprints and drawings and their related aspects; on the other hand, rock, or the physical context and built manifestations of the project – two poles which are in constant dialogue, explored simultaneously by interior architects.

We started the semester with two short and discrete case studies. One of them focused on a relevant “paper” project, drawn from the history of architecture, that aimed to offer a form of alternative reality through drawings and other tools of representation. While these materials often relate to the larger urban scale, we speculated on interiors that strive for some sort of coherence. The other case study concerned “rock” – the very concrete situations in which we work. The projects took place within urban villas that are typical of the city of Lausanne and the surrounding region. These buildings form a radically discontinuous urbanity, one made of isolated interiors and that might seem at odds with the totalising horizons depicted by the “paper” studies. We also went on a field trip to visit some of these buildings and get familiar with their context.

In a second phase, the aim was to translate some of the ideas gathered from “paper” to “rock” and vice-versa, to see how the “rock” might influence the “paper” ideas. We offered interior transformations within the urban villas, each of them attempting to reflect on the tension between the existing and the possible, between the somewhat bourgeois banality of the urban villas and the bold utopia of “paper architecture”.