THE MUSEUM AS PUBLIC DEVICE
Dafni Retzepi
Dafni Retzepi and Philippe Buchs are architects, educators and curators based between Geneva and Athens. Both studied architecture at EPFL and combine architectural practice with research, teaching, writing and cultural production.
Dafni received her PhD with honours from the Università di Bologna in 2024. Her thesis, The Corners of Form, investigates the relationship between architectural form, politics and art, focusing on iconism and the global proliferation and capitalisation of museums and culture. She has taught at the ETH Zurich Chair of Architecture and Care since 2023. Philippe has taught at ETH Zurich since 2019. Together, they are Guest professors in ETH Zurich in 2026, experimenting on the transformation of obsolete architectures.
In 2020, they co-founded Sujets Objets in Geneva. The practice works with existing buildings and situations through reuse, precise transformations, negotiation and on-site experimentation. Moving across scale and format, their work combines construction with research, performance, curation and public programmes.
Their projects include Porteous, the transformation of a former water-treatment building into a socio-cultural space through a participatory and incremental process; Espace Clarté, a cultural space within Le Corbusier’s Immeuble Clarté; CODEX, a media-art centre in Geneva; and Appartement Témoin, a collective experiment transforming vacant offices into places for inhabitation, discussion and production.
Dafni and Philippe co-curate 210.OFIS a space for experimentaion and residencies in Athens.
Their shared interests lie in architecture’s capacity to transform that which is already there, questioning established boundaries and creating new relations between institutions, communities and public life.
What makes museums timelessly fascinating and complex is their position at the intersection of politics, society, economy, popular culture, art, architecture and urbanism. Their proliferation, decline and occasional rejection are closely linked to every aspect of life, making them powerful cultural mirrors.
The Museum as Public Device explores this civic role by experimenting with the architectural presence of cultural institutions.
In the 1990s, Relational Art and New Institutionalism confronted institutional contradictions from within. Artists and curators extended institutions into cafés, archives, educational programmes and the urban realm, redefining relationships between art, audiences and the city. Yet their architectural counterpart remains largely unexplored. The museum boom at the turn of the century produced iconic, controlled containers, often detached from their social and political contexts.
The Museum as Public Device invites architecture to take up this unfinished question. Rather than treating the museum as a monument or finished object, we approach it as an adjustable civic apparatus: a spatial framework that can be opened, negotiated and transformed through use. Combining research with situated interventions, the project engages local communities, cultural workers and institutions. Thresholds, ground floors, construction sites, archives and informal spaces become places where institutional power can be renegotiated and new forms of public life can emerge.
Through LINA, we aim to extend this research beyond individual projects and develop it collaboratively at a European scale. Working across diverse institutions, communities and contexts would produce a shared repertoire of architectural attitudes.