A special edition bringing together three issues of the journal of architecture criticism under a single title: "Dixit: Switzerland!". Six prominent figures with links to Switzerland are invited to discuss common and topical issues.
Dixit 06 — "Ephemeral / Durable", Hélène Binet + Elli Mosayebi
How can the ephemeral and the durable be defined—and translated into architecture? Can the obsolescence of a model, a building, or a use be anticipated, when their fleeting nature resists evaluation?
Dixit 07 — "Detail", Alia Bengana + Tiphaine Abenia.
What is the relevance of examining architectural detail today? Has it become merely anecdotal in the face of the multiple crises the profession must confront?
Dixit 08 — "Speed", Carlotta Darò + Raphaël Kadid.
What temporal scale can we adopt if speed is relentless, allowing neither acceleration nor deceleration? Does speed today lie in the time required to complete an action, or in the competitive potential of multiple entities performing it?
In the spirit of a discipline that constantly renews itself,
Caryatide Editions take up the mantle of the critical review. Their aim is to further enrich the
architecture discourse by offering a voice that engages directly with current events. Architecture stands at the crossroads of multiple inquiries—a discipline nourished by cross-disciplinary approaches. In this sense, and as a defining principle, Caryatide is committed to maintaining a critical perspective, one enriched by the social and political lens through which architecture must be understood, in order to reveal its complexity and aspirations.
Each issue, published three times a year, invites two contributors to share their reflections on a previously unexplored theme.
A Swiss-French, internationally acclaimed visual artist and photographer based in London, Hélène Binet (born 1959) has been photographing both contemporary and historic architecture around the world. Her work has been featured in numerous national and international exhibitions, including solo shows at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2021), and the Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2019). In 2007, she was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. She received the Julius Shulman Institute Excellence in Photography Award in 2015 and was awarded the Ada Louise Huxtable Prize in 2019, recognizing a woman who has made a significant contribution to architecture.
The close connection between practice, research and teaching characterises the career of Elli Mosayebi (born 1977 in Tehran). Since 2004 she has co-led the Zurich-based architecture office EMI Architekt*innen with Ron Edelaar and Christian Inderbitzin. Through numerous competition-winning projects, her work places particular emphasis on housing and urban design. Since 2018, she has been Professor for Architecture and Design at ETH Zurich, where she advances an ecological pedagogy that links design to material cycles, territorial processes, and socio-ecological responsibility.
Tiphaine Abenia is an engineer-architect and researcher. She is an associate professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), where she coordinates the «Constructive Cultures» programme and the Reclaim research center within the Faculty of Architecture. Her research aims to reframe design and construction paradigms through a non-extractivist perspective. By engaging with the entire life cycle of buildings, she focuses on liminal phases such as incompletion, abandonment, construction site, and dismantling.
Alia Bengana (born 1975 in Algiers) is an Algerian-French architect, teacher, independent researcher, and author. For the past fifteen years, she has explored natural materials, with a particular focus on raw earth and plant fibers. Her work weaves together design practice, research, and pedagogy. She has taught in Switzerland and France, notably at EPFL Lausanne (2021–2024), HEIA Fribourg, and the École d'architecture de la ville et des territoires Paris-Est. A fellow at the Villa Medici – Académie de France in Rome in 2025–2026, she is developing there, together with Tiphaine Abenia, a research and representation project on constructive simplicity conceived as a realignment of building practices with contemporary urgencies: frugality, reversibility, clarity of systems, and territorial grounding.
Carlotta Darò is an art historian who lectures at the École nationale supérieure d'architecture Paris-Malaquais (ENSAPM). Since 2022 she has been a visiting researcher at the Gramazio Kohler Research group at ETH Zurich. Her work lies at the intersection of architecture, art, sound technologies and media. She has published in a range of journals, including The Journal of Architecture, AAFiles, gta papers and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte.
Raphael Kadid is a French architect and designer based in Basel, practicing in the fields of architecture, product design, photography and edition. Since 2021, he has been operating as an independent architect and designer through various collaborations. Alongside his practice, he publishes the art and architecture newsletter Daily Dose, and runs Raphael Kadid Objects, his eponymous design studio founded in Basel in 2020. Since 2022, Raphael Kadid is involved in teaching at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
