Diploma HS 2025
The Accidental Gartenstadt
3 May 2025, Dübendorf
Imagine a place with a variety of buildings set within rich landscapes where you can walk, cycle, play football, grow fruit and vegetables, live and work. The easy way that interiors and exteriors relate, and the self-evident arrangement of public and private, suggests this place as a paradigm, yet it is never mentioned in those terms. Architecture and urban planning as they are conventionally defined play little part in the evident success of this place that can accommodate so much while making such modest demands, a place whose residents appear quite content.
Dübendorf is an accidental Gartenstadt, a place where gardens are big, and rents are low. Its industrial and agricultural areas, close to Stettbach station, are already being transformed into a typically dense Zurich agglomeration. We can optimistically regard this over-development as an expansion valve for the town, but if the modest scales and rich open spaces of the older parts of town are to remain, there will now have to be some thinking and planning done to sustain the positive spatial and economic qualities that are present today.
We will engage with this special place and work with its existing qualities to make a Dübendorf that can become more socially and physically sustainable. Our plans will consider how education can become a new, complementary programme for this settlement, something to reinforce and work alongside existing economies and communities. The main design phase of the project will involve the transformation and new construction of buildings and landscapes that imagine the future of this accidental Gartenstadt.
We will work with the Chair of Being Alive so that buildings and landscape are given an equivalence in our discussions. We will also collaborate with Newrope in three ‘rooms of entanglement’, workshops where content, process and place are considered in an expanded forum.
Preparation phase:
-learn how to do field work and to work effectively on site using a journal, making annotations, observing and drawing.
-production of legal codes and plans that identify areas of potential change within Dübendorf and feasibility studies that engage with the geological, vegetal, social and historical conditions of Dübendorf
Elaboration phase:
-development of specific design proposals that incorporate new programmes and ways of living for Dübendorf, using transformation and new constriction.
Diploma, HS 2025, ETH Zürich
Chair Caruso
Emilie Appercé, Tibor Bielicky, Adam Caruso,
Chair of Being Alive
Teresa Galí-Izard
Open Position
Studio Assistant
HS 2025
The chair is looking for a new assistant to join our team for the next semester.
Please send CV and short portfolio to caruso@arch.ethz.ch
The Village
The Village – Studio Review 2
April 16, 2025
Dag von der Decken, Julius Baumanns, Yannick Angehrn
Wednesday, April 16th, Studio Review, ETH Zürich, ONA E30, 09:00 – 18:00
Guests: Valentina Noce, Max Otto Zitzelsberger
The Village - Studio Review 1
March 12, 2025
Kartonfabrik, Ennenda, Landesarchiv Glarus
Wednesday, March 12th, Studio Review, ETH Zürich, ONA E30, 10:00 – 18:00
Guests: Myriam Marti, Niels Olsen
The Village
Introduction 18 February 2025, 10 am
Ennenda, 2024
The continuous asphalt and endless basements of Oerlikon seal the ground, so that the summer heat cannot dissipate in the inferno of the contemporary urban environment. The city, with its concentration of wealth and scarcity of land is melting down; do the tensions and incipient violence that make the city exciting also contain the seeds of its ruin?
With multicentric societies reflected in its federal politics, Switzerland’s infrastructure and resources are more evenly spread over its terrain than in most countries. The rural still encompasses diverse economies that include industry, agriculture and tourism. Often, the villages and towns of the un-city have had a vibrant past, so that today one finds underused buildings and infrastructure that could become activated by new ideas for society. Contemporary approaches to planning usually encourage the gentrification and the suburbanisation of the rural. Instead, architects and their clients could be working to amplify and consolidate the lack of density, the slower pace of life and the possibility of more balanced ideas of settlement inherent in these places.
This semester we will work in the village of Ennenda, a place with a long history and a diverse legacy of buildings. While agriculture is very present in the village and its surroundings, factories that are part of supply chains within the Glarus valley, employ almost one thousand people. The village has empty and underused structures, but demand for new housing and workspace is typically addressed by demolition and replacement with generic models from the urban agglomeration. We will make projects that challenge these lazy assumptions and by engaging with the networks and histories that underly the village’s substance, demonstrating the enormous potential in repairing and adding to what already exists.
Introduction: 18 February 2025, 10:00 am, ONA E30
Site visit to Ennenda: 22 February 2022, details to be announced.
Construction and writing as integrated disciplines are included in this course.
FS 2025, ETH Zürich, Studio Caruso
Emilie Appercé, Lucia Bernini, Tibor Bielicky, Adam Caruso, Yosuke Nakamoto
A Few Villages in France
Seminar Week: March 17–21, 2025
Saint-Géry, Dordogne
Eric Tabuchi & Nelly Monnier, Atlas des Régions Naturelles
And only the earth is immortal, the Great Mother from whom we spring and to whom we return, love of whom can drive us to crime and through whom life is perpetually preserved for her own inscrutable ends, in which even our wretched degraded nature has its part to play.
Émile Zola, The Earth
There exists in France an almost spiritual relationship to the land. It is, as Zola says, the origin and the depository for all life, and its correct management makes possible food and drink of a transcendent quality, made in the context of territories and buildings that are similarly embedded in their place. Talk of ‘la terre’ has long been the domain of nationalist nostalgia, but there also exist emergent practices that are reframing how our complex relationship to the land can better balance the demands of life and its environment.
We will visit people and places where food, drink, architecture and territory are being thought about in progressive and sustainable ways. We will visit new architecture that in its process and materialisation is startlingly fresh, and eat some meals where low environmental impact in their production is matched by vibrant and complex tastes, all part of an introduction to how villages and their territories are writing stories for the future.
The costs are approximately 750 to 1000 CHF including accommodation, transportation in France, dinners, entrances and reader.
The journey to France is not included.
Category D, 16 students
FS 2025, ETH Zürich, Studio Caruso
Emilie Appercé, Lucia Bernini, Tibor Bielicky, Adam Caruso, Yosuke Nakamoto
Diploma FS 2025
Un-City
Diesbach, autumn 2024
For a long time, the city has been a magnet for money, for jobs, for culture and for learning. This concentration of everything leads to an inexhaustible demand for resources. There will never be enough land to exploit for profit or adequate housing for the population, a condition of scarcity that is fundamental to late capitalism. This semester we will work in places away from the city where the space exists for more balanced ideas of society to bloom. With the coming of the snow, we descend from the Klausen pass, from 2000 to 600 metres. Linthal, Rüti and Diesbach are villages at the head of the valley, each has clusters of houses and outbuildings, substantial mill complexes with their own hydro power station on the river Linth and abundant agricultural lands. Many of these structures are underused, but in their rich spatial diversity they are a fertile ground waiting for new social programmes. The history of the Glarus Valley is one of invention, industry and agriculture. The human and material resources of the valley obviously still exist, and if the already existing cooperatives and associations could become more interconnected, new energies would emerge from these new networks. This semester we will engage with the contemporary life of Glarus. Observing and recording the social and physical fabric of the villages we will meet as many people as we can, to benefit from their knowledge and to share some of their ambitions. Following themes that will include hydro power, food, industry, health and learning, we will deploy strategies of adaptation and improvisation, in the short and the long term, to develop new kinds of incomplete utopias. Existing and new construction, landscapes and buildings, will transform and consolidate the qualities and constellations that we have found and begin to reveal what the future life of the un-city could be.
Diploma, FS 2025, ETH Zürich
Chair Caruso
Emilie Appercé, Adam Caruso
Chair of Being Alive
Stefan Breit, Teresa Galí-Izard
Baumeister: Selected by Caruso St John
B11 Baumeister: Selected by Caruso St John
Curated Issue November 2024
For the November 2024 issue of the magazine Caruso St John have selected a Baumeister Reader, a series of texts that touch on different aspects of the challenges that lie ahead for the practice of architecture.
Remoteness and Identity
Remoteness and Identity
Introduction 17 September 2024, 10 am
Klausenpass, August 2024
You don’t just ‘go for a walk’ in Canada. Setting off north from Montreal, the last settlements soon recede into the distance and eventually you reach the North Pole; it is a harsh one-way journey. Similarly, a trip north in Britain ultimately encounters, dead-end, the North Sea. Switzerland, on the other hand, is in the middle of the European landmass. Traversing even the most exposed alpine pass leads, before too long, to inhabited lands. The image and the instrumentalising of mountains, alps, and passes lies at the root of Switzerland’s identity, economy and history, for the land has long been a crossroads for goods and people. Before too long, those who choose to stay, or who are left behind, become Swiss.
Lately, Swiss architecture has become enmeshed in densifying cities and suburbs, making concentrated centres, with little attention being paid to its counterpart: the condition of remoteness. With the climate crisis comes a reassessment of many aspects of Swiss land management and construction, including agriculture and tourism, and these important contributors to the image and the economy of Switzerland play out amongst the mountains.
This semester we will re-evaluate the qualities and uses of remoteness at the Klausenpass, where, at 1948 metres, the cantons of Glarus and Uri overlap. We will study and map the social and the historical, getting to know the walkers, bikers, soldiers, and maintenance crews that are its visitors today. Informed by cartographies, handbooks, and chronicles we will go on to design intimate settlements – newly constructed places that with buildings and gardens provide a space for contemplation, assembly, and quiet industry in this special place at the top of Europe.
Introduction: 17 September 2024, 10:00 am, Klausenpass, Details to be announced
Construction and writing as integrated disciplines are included in this course
HS 2024, ETH Zürich, Studio Caruso
Emilie Appercé, Lucia Bernini, Tibor Bielicky, Adam Caruso, Yosuke Nakamoto
IEA Lecture
All buildings are beautiful
October 9, 2024, 18:00
Adam Caruso
IEA Lecture Series HS 24
Practice What We Teach?
ETH Zürich, ONA, Fokushalle
A New Museum
Redesigning Museums
Re (Reframe, Rearrange, Repeat)
Reframe, Rearrange, Repeat
Re form
An Agora for Seebach - A new, „cultural and symbolic center“ for the neighborhood of Zurich Seebach. The architect of St. Mark‘s Church and later city architect of Zurich, Albert Heinrich Steiner, saw the situation on the Buhn-hill with the Buhnrain schoolhouse and St. Mark‘s Church as an optimal example of the center of a neighborhood. Unfortunately, not much of this can be seen today. the project is to change this! Although the buildings of St. Maark‘s Church and the Buhnrain Schoolhouse are almost built together, they do not have much in common. The project was to bring these two institutions together, one has too much - the other too little space, especially in view of the Mittagstisch 2025, where all schools in Zurich have to offer a day school structure with Lunch table for all students and for which the Buhnrain school building cannot offer any space.
Intervention points of the project - In order to connect the two institutions, more space is needed between them and a more direct connection between the school building and the community hall. The demolition of the no longer contemporary caretaker‘s apartment of the church creates a square between the buildings.
A new neighborhood square is created - The free square between the school and the church is to become a meeting place for the residents of the rapidly growing Seebach neighborhood. The population can meet there and linger in the various squares or gardens, an agora for Seebach.
New access and conversion of the room- The parish hall will get a new vestibule, oriented to the square. The caretaker‘s apartment of the school will be converted into a neighborhood space, as well as the arcade of the school will be extended and the volume broken through, connecting the two buildings more directly. Public toilets will be installed in the opening of the school.
A new axis connects the Church garden- A new path runs between the two buildings and connects the road leading up the hill, the „Höhenring“ with the upper neighborhood. The path is made of spolia of stones from the city of Zurich and stones from the quarry at the foot of the hill. This new axis at right angles to the large schoolhouse square connects the new neighborhood square with the church garden, which is currently little used and beautifully situated over Zurich Seebach / Oerlikon. The Landscape by landscape architect Gustav Ammann will be carefully extended. Outside, on a hilltop at the edge of the hill, a Monopteros, a viewing pavilion above the „Theater of the Goats“ is being built.
A shelter with multiple functions - The address from the north is formed by a paved square. This is followed by the new path with slight steps and a slight slope. A shelter with fine wooden supports follows this path and lends itself to various uses. Be it as a market stall for a neighborhood market or as a bicycle parking. The square is available for larger events such as a market or a neighborhood festival.
A garden pavilion as a focal point - The outdoor space design by Gustav Amman is carefully completed and meanders through the Gap, thus connecting the currently unused garden of the church with the new agora. The garden, in the most beautiful location above Seebach with a view of Oerlikon, is supplemented with an Odeon, a garden pavilion. This is available for smaller events. Together with the garden or the community hall, it can also be part of a larger event, for example, before a party in the hall, the aperitif can be drunk in the garden. The wooden pavilion with supports made of tree trunks fits perfectly in the context of the group of trees planted by Amman.
James Flaus / Luca Bronca
FS 2022 Re form
Bullingerkirche
IEA Lecture
You cannot take risks without failing
March 15, 2022, 18:00
Adam Caruso
IEA Lecture Series FS 22
One Building, Failure Is an Option
ETH Zürich, ONA, Fokushalle
Interim, forever
Projekt Interim Waldhaus
Women Writing Architecture
Website Launch
June 30, 2021
The website womenwritingarchitecture.org was launched this week on June 30th. The new resource, an annotated bibliography of writing by women about architecture, is now publicly accessible to discover, browse and contribute to.
Making Plans for Living Together
Reuse of Waste into new use
Food is the one of the most central topics and relevant to climate change that we are facing, because it embedded in the daily life of everyone and closely connected with the big climate and ecological context. Its impact in the social, political and economical scale force us to rethink the way of dealing huge food circle. The future food production is about reproduction. Thousands tons of food waste is producing in the building site of HERDERN areal every day. Since all of the bio-waste can be easily treated with modern industry and reused as bio-fertiliser, it brings a huge economical potential to the fruit market of the site.
Productivity dances with public life together
The Architecture sets out to deliver an image of coming life of new Zurich, an inspiring environment in which to have a special experience of a sustainable civic life. The spirit of the proposal starts with the circumstance of the project as an important fruit and vegetables logistic centre at the old Zurich industrial area, where almost like a forgotten place of the city during the day, as nearly the activities of the site happens in the midnight. The new adding program aims to work with the existing logistic function of the site together, and bring the daily civic life into it.
Machines and garden
The design is conceived as an idealised vision of factory, bringing together production activities and landscape in an almost Arcadian composition of machines and gardens. To largely respect the existing program of the site, not to obstacle the current use, the new intervention is proposed to sit on the old building. Logistic space of upper floor of existing building will be incorporated into a new arrangement with productive machines in between, where old construction will be continued and reinforced. A productive public garden will occupy the whole top floor with new roof structure. The workers at the site will be the beneficial owner of the new interventions, since the waste of the existing site is the main source of the upper production, which makes profit for the both sides. The public will see in the factory an interconnected program that delivering a big image of living being in the every phase of life circle in a symbiotic garden around. The Garden is proposed to connect the existing public activities in the Brache along the Limmat river, and to be a destination and a meeting point for citizens as the new city takes shape slowly around it.
Fiona Kuang / Linda Sjøqvist
FS 2021 Making Plans for Living Together, Zürich
Making Plans for Living
Marina Medic / Maria Unterlechner
HS 2020 Making Plans for Living, Zürich
Ragamala, Indian Miniatures
Re-Use Ciba
The environment of a building is under continuous social, economic and technological change. What role does the construction of a building play in the process of these environmental changes? Do new usage requirements inevitably lead to a complete replacement of the building, or can they be converted to make them suitable for the new environment? Can CIBA’s existing welfare building from 1957 fin a changed form even play an innovative, identity-creating role in a newly developed quarter?
Observing the existing has pushed me to choose the new paradigm of a personal comfort-adaptive architecture thanks to which I have created a new art of participatory inhabitation. My project highlights the importance of adaptability and flexibility in design. The doctorands are free to shift, adjust and divide the spaces based on their personal needs through flexible partitions (i.e. layers and walls). In addition, the flexibility of the layers and the controlled / uncontrolled spaces allow the doctorands to regulate the thermal conditions within the entire building.
To a large extent, CIBA’s welfare building built in 1957 is left close to its original state, with small-scale interventions and adaptations. Innovation and research are part of CIBA’s welfare house’s identity – they have always been and will remain. The doctorand’s house aims to be a place where innovation and research can flourish, a doctorand’s house that is perfectly adaptable to the needs of the individual as well as of the community.
What is it worth?
Welche Heimat?
Tobias Wagner
HS 2019 Welche Heimat?
Society and the Image
Roma Brunner / Carmen Kempf
HS 2019 Society and the Image, Zürich
Download Booklet
PDF 16 MB
Public Building
Mirjam Kupferschmid / Guy Keller
FS 2019 Public Building, Zürich
SESC Pompéia, Lina Bo Bardi
São Paulo, 1986
Hidden Interiors
Alisa Labrenz / Moritz Schudel
HS 2018 Hidden Interiors, Zürich
Chambre á Coucher, Charles Percier / Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine
Paris, 1812
The Ideal City
Elif Erez / Victor Stolbovoy
FS 2018 The Ideal City, Spreitenbach
Collage City, OMA
Ville Nouvelle Melun Sénart, 1987
Describing Beauty
Leonie Braunschweig
HS 2017 Describing Beauty, Zürich
Egyptian Sculpture
Structure and Society
Andrea Micanovic / Michael Furrer
FS 2017 Structure and Society, Zürich
Centraal Beheer, Herman Hertzberger
Apeldoorn, 1972
Social Structure
Camillo Fiorito
HS 2016 Social Structure, Graubünden
Politics & Demographics
Graubünden
