Working on Transformation

Working on Transformation begins with an encounter. Created through exchanges between faculty, students, and collaborators at the Chair of Architecture and Urban Transformation at ETH Zurich (NEWROPE), these meetings operate as acts of world-building. They ask participants and audiences to rehearse new forms of alliance, at a moment when critical design education is under renewed pressure to evolve. Documenting NEWROPE’s teaching experiments, the book becomes both record and companion. It looks forward, too, anticipating future experiments that can be staged beyond the institution. In that sense, it is not a manual for collaboration, but part of collaboration itself.

Designed for use rather than display, the book is intentionally portable: something to keep close, carry, and return to. Its narrative unfolds across four chapters, each organised around a verb: to project, to experience, to sequence, and to activate. Each verb appears twice. First as an Action, surveying established practices in architecture and urban transformation. Then as a Primer, inviting readers to re-enact those practices in new and still-forming ways. Developed within NEWROPE’s Design in Dialogue Lab, the work draws on props and performative mock-ups as tools for communication and engagement. Read as both documentation and prompt, the book becomes a working object in its own right: a prop for tacit co-creation.

● Published by In Other Words
● Designed by OK-RM
● 244 pages 
● 4.7 × 6.7 inches
● 1750 copies
● ISBN 978-1-9192118-0-0