STONE WALLS AND FIREWALLS – DATA AND RESILIENT ARCHITECTURES
Sascha Roesler – Stone walls and firewalls
Castles once defended us with thick stone walls, tall towers, and visible strength. Today, cities are still fortified, but their defences are harder to see. Dashboards, models, and predictive algorithms now stand guard, as we simulate responses to heatwaves, floods, and other effects of climate change. Architect and professor at the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio, Sascha Roesler digs into how urban resilience has shifted from stone walls to firewalls, and how data-driven systems are reshaping the way we design, protect, and inhabit the spaces we call home.
Date: Saturday, September 6, 2025
Time: 17.30 – 19.00
Language: English
Place: Castel Grande
Long before “smart cities” became a buzzword, the Berkeley Environmental Simulation Laboratory was already projecting future climates onto tabletop-scale models to study how cities might respond to changing environmental conditions.
Part war room and part digital sandbox, somewhere between Swissminiature and Minecraft, the lab became a space of control and simulation, where urban resilience could be tested and tweaked.
Castles like the one in Bellinzona that now hosts the MUDA once defended us with thick stones, tall towers, and visible strength. Today, cities are still fortified, but their defences are harder to see. Dashboards, climate models, and predictive algorithms now stand guard, as we simulate responses to heatwaves, floods, and pollution. Resilience has shifted from stone walls to firewalls, raising important questions: who builds these systems, what do they measure, and what (or who) gets left outside?
Architecture rubbing shoulders with algorithms and cities shaped by data flows most of us never see is what fuels Sascha Roesler. His research digs into how environmental data is reshaping the way we build the spaces we live in. Deep in the hidden back-end of urban design, where forecasts and optimisation models rule supreme, his talk unpacks what it means to plan, defend, and dwell in the digital fortresses of our time.
Sascha Roesler is an architect, author, and professor at the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio, where he investigates how climate, data, and design intersect in the shaping of contemporary cities and urban futures.
His research moves between architecture, ethnography, and environmental science, often focusing on the invisible systems, from microclimates to algorithms, that govern how we live.
