Johan Wijesinghe
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Architecture in Large Quantities
Zurich SwitzerlandCities grew through repetition. Patterns, typologies, and variations that together produced richness over time. The contemporary profession has largely abandoned that logic in favour of the singular object, which makes repeating good architecture rare. Under the pressure of a global housing crisis and a climate emergency, that is no longer a defensible position.
The idea of the housing factory has a history. Wachsmann and Gropius developed the Packaged House in the 1940s. Prouvé built panel systems that could be assembled on site in days. Habitat 67, the Eames House, the Case Study programme — each was an attempt to reconcile industrial production with architectural quality.
Architecture in Large Quantities was a visiting studio co-led with Gilles Retsin at ETH Zürich's Institute of Technology in Architecture, in collaboration with the Chair of Building Construction. Over two semesters, 54 students developed construction systems capable of producing thousands of timber homes across Zurich and Los Angeles. The central question was simple: if this building were repeated a thousand times, would it still be good?
The studio unfolded in two phases. In the first, students designed timber systems in detail. Joints, panels, modules. Each demonstrated through physical models and axonometric drawings. In the second, parametric tools and AI-driven workflows were used to deploy those systems across more than 40 real sites in the two cities. The proposition was that design at this scale is a question of steering rather than authoring. Not optimisation, but nudging. Students were asked to account for what their systems could not do.
As co-instructor I managed three assistants and developed the digital infrastructure of the studio, building workflows in which sketches and AI-generated forms could be translated into modular, buildable timber systems. The aim was to keep manual intuition and computational process in a feedback loop rather than a sequence.
Cristiano Teixeira, Gilles Retsin, Johan Wijesinghe, Wenqian Yang
Student Assistants:
Penelope Croset, Eric Gozzi
Contributors:
Jennifer Bohnner, Marianne Burkhalter, Mollie Claypool, Sophie Collier, Timothy Cooke, Elisabetta Fedele, Jonathan Heppner, Fabio Gramazio, Matthias Kohler, Debora Mesa Molina, Sille Pihlak, Casey Rehm, Kevin Saey, Anton Savov, Amin Taha, Ramon Weber
Luca Allemann, Kevin Bellwalder, Lara Becks, Adrien Bressan, Lancelot Bruwell, M. Alexandra Crum, Lorenzo Cruz, Samuel Dafflon, Alessio Destefani, Constantin Dirler, Manuel Eichenberger, Lucas Fischötter, Selina Frauenfelder, Alexandre Galiotto, Romeo-Noah Geiger, Silvio Gonçalves, Rebecca Grace, Pauline Gähwiler, Jérémie Guyot, Albert Hatt, Johannes Hoppensack, José Häni, Anaïs Hunziker, Elif Isikli, Lea Jenzer, Jonas Schmidt, Lina Karim, Basil Kretz, John Leyel, Moira Martínez-Avial, Janina Pasinelli, Clara Paulen, Carl Petersen, Timon Rajmon, Andreas Regli, Chris Reisinger, Lucas Rodriguez, Jonas Schmid, Robin Schärer, Nico Simone, Dominik Stoll, Timon Stettler, Dominik Tassera, Alexander Thöny, Chloé Tournelle, Leon Trommer, Gion Tschümperlin, Eric Wolfensberger, Bo Yang, Joris Weiss, Li Zeming