As part of our teaching at HEAD – Geneva, we had been exploring for several years the renewal of the city from within, specifically examining the ability of existing buildings, which constitute ordinary heritage (residential buildings, office buildings, factories, etc.), to adapt to the new lifestyles of our society.

This project responded to an open call launched by the PAV LIVING ROOM association in June 2024.

Our multidisciplinary teaching team (architects, interior architects, philosophers-dramatists) had chosen the site at 18 Rue Baylon as the area for exploration. This industrial architectural complex, which offers a highly diverse typology (administrative building, garages, workshops, etc.), caught our attention for its ordinary qualities. Furthermore, the proximity to the railway, the dead-end street and its roundabout, the sequence of inner courtyards, and the footbridge all contribute to a rich urban landscape, offering an excellent opportunity for analysis and experimentation for our students. We presented the event Surimpression as the first pedagogical step of our Fall 2024 semester and introduced this little-known fragment of the PAV industrial heritage to as broad an audience as possible through the descriptive narratives created by the students. The writing work was supervised by philosopher and dramatist Sébastien Grosset. Formally, this was an in situ performance where the speakers described aloud the spaces in which they found themselves, as well as hypothetical architectural interventions designed to adapt these places to new programs. Thus, the real spaces were overlaid with their descriptions, and these descriptions included the multiple and sometimes contradictory hypotheses of their possible futures. This "spoken architecture" wove a polyphonic landscape that guided the audience through an auditory walk to discover the site. Each visitor traced their own dream of the future space by combining what they touched and saw with the multiple hypotheses they heard.

Through this performance, we aime to contribute to the reflection on new architectural practices by engaging with the question of narrative and the body within the space of the climate metropolis.