Immersive design studio, a field study on Gramazio and Kohler research

Starting in the fall of 2022, Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler have been conducting a series of six immersive studios for architectural design at the Chair of Architecture and Digital Fabrication at ETH Zurich. This article is based on a 3-year period of observation of the processes and methods used in this pedagogical framework and on interviews with the people involved. Through the identification of key terms and concepts such as realism, illusion and abstraction, the study attempts to expand backwards to trace an ongoing genealogy of immersive techniques. In conclusion, it questions the design process in architecture and the supposed capacity of the means of representation to offer a perceptive experience of a project to come.