Remoteness and Identity
Remoteness and Identity - Studio Review 1
October 16, 2024
Wednesday, October 16th, Studio Review, ETH Zürich, ONA E30, 09:30 – 17:00
Guest: Sophie von Einsiedel
Remoteness and Identity
Introduction 17 September 2024, 10am
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
Solitude
Seminar Week: October 20–25, 2024
Carved Stone, Aberdeenshire
Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.
The Creative Process, James Baldwin 1962
Baldwin equates creativity with solitude. Unbound by the strictures of society, the artist achieves their intellectual and spiritual independence through an equivalent social one. Today many of us feel that our inner and outer lives are cluttered by increasing quantities of unwanted matter, and perhaps we all need a little more time on our own to care for our physical and psychological health.
This semester we will go to Scotland, which unlike Switzerland, is not on the way to anywhere. Travelling North, human settlements become sparser and the character of the people, and their ways of life, respond to increasing measures of isolation. Beyond the northern land edge there are only islands, a sense of entering an unfamiliar place and of Europe left behind.
We will travel from Edinburgh to the Orkney Islands visiting people and places that have found ways to inhabit this harsh and beautiful land. We will visit small communities, reviving traditional forms of agriculture and craft, stopping by Hospitalfield, an artists’ residency. We will encounter sites of pagan and early Christian settlements that still speak to the liberating potential of solitude.
The costs are approximately 750 to 1000 CHF including Transportation, Accommodation, Guides and Reader.
Category D, 16 students
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
Diploma HS 2024
Switzerland at a crossroads
Inferno (detail), chalk on masonite, 242 × 1219 cm, Tacita Dean, 2019
Control of the mountain passes is a historic source of Switzerland’s wealth and a powerful part of its national mythology. The passes were like switches that enabled individual cantons, and the whole federation, to be transformed from a fortress in the middle of Europe to a crossroads and marketplace at its centre. The passes were not only conduits for goods and services but have historically provided routes of migration between cantons and from beyond. Today with the main business of exchange displaced to tunnels deep within the mountains, the passes have become liberated, becoming places that encourage the informal, the peripheral and the uneconomic. It might not be easy to gain a foothold at 2000 metres, but there is a lot of air, stone, and sky there. With rising temperatures and receding icefields, the passes will become more accessible and habitable. In response to the diploma’s overarching question of ‘how will we live together’, our focus will be on those places away from the density of the centre that are necessary for society to be sustained and at ease with itself. The semester will start with a series of close readings of the living systems such as geology, vegetation, climate, and water of the Klausenpass, the things that make the atmosphere of the place and the material for future interventions. At 1948 metres the pass is where the cantons of Glarus and Uri meet. We will study and map the social and the historical, finding out who inhabited the pass before the walkers, bikers, soldiers, and maintenance crews that one meets there today. With 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.
Diploma, HS 2024, ETH Zürich
Chair Caruso
Emilie Appercé, Adam Caruso
Chair of Being Alive
Stefan Breit, Teresa Galí-Izard
A New Museum
The Memories of the House Museum is devoted to the domestic spaces of textile industry related housing in Ennenda, Kanton Glarus. This museum spreads all over the village, like a fabric of spaces, each giving a specific impression of a domestic space.
The main exhibition is located in the former industrial site of the Jenny factory in Ennenda. It is situated on the ground floor of a Hängeturm, a reconstruction of a historical local building typology, specifically created to dry freshly printed fabrics. The exhibition consists of 1:1 reconstructions of 19th century domestic spaces from Ennenda. Copying, relocating and rearranging the rooms allows to compare the conditions of dwelling between different social classes that were all involved in the textile industry. It is an attempt to revise the way the local history has been written and to counterbalance the inequality of documentation and preservation of local buildings and stories. The reconstructions are built in timber, each with one section as a plaster cast of the original space. The exhibition of physical spaces is accompanied by pieces of local oral history in the form of specific stories told over speakers.
The Museum spreads into the village and the interventions at Kirchweg are the most direct extension of the museum programme. The row of houses at Kirchweg is under heritage protection and despite having survived for almost two hundred years, some of the houses have started to decay after losing the uses of the ground floor spaces. Previously some of those spaces were used for commercial functions. The houses had stayed relevant because they had the necessary room for adaptation: physically in the form of extensions on the northern side, legally in the form the law. Today this adaptation is partly hindered by heritage protection. With my interventions I aim to find a method to adapt three of those ground floor spaces and to restore their former use, whilst providing a programme that is needed by the museum whilst also becoming a cultural and public space for residents of Ennenda.
Arno Covas / Jakob Diekman
FS 2024 A New Museum
Redesigning Museums
Re (Reframe, Rearrange, Repeat)
Reframe, Rearrange, Repeat
Re form
After the Reformation, the church handed over social tasks to the welfare state. It seems obvious that today’s capitalist state is not up to this task. Now, perhaps more than ever, there is social injustice.The gap between rich and poor is widening and the right to a place in society is by no means a reality for all.
The church still has the luxury of not taking on the same tasks as the state. It can act more freely and support thoughts, concepts and people who would perish or fall short with bureaucratic means alone.This freedom of action is elementary in the existence of the church and must be further deepened and expanded.
The role of the Predigerareal has a consistency over the years. It was always a haven for people on the fringes of society.This refuge became less important through the Reformation, the rise of capitalism and the anonymity of the modern city.
Libraries, such as the Zentralbibliothek next to the Predigerkirche, are public institutions.Their mandate is to make knowledge accessible to all but not directly engage in work against social inequality. However, history shows that these ideas are connected.
With the emergence of the internet and Big Data, libraries, like churches, are becoming islands in the vortex of an increasingly fast-paced society.There it is still possible to obtain knowledge without having to reveal personal information. Anonymity in the acquisition of knowledge has become a rare commodity, which, however, presupposes a deceleration of the individual.
It seems as if the good can only be realised in an environment removed from the fast and profit-oriented society. Away from the everyday whirl of a capitalist world, islands with their own laws can emerge.
Within this symbiotic island in the centre of Zurich, the church can benefit directly from the knowledge and educational mission of the library.The mixture of the audience leads to new points of contact. However, space must be provided for this conglomerate. In this project, spatial connections shape an ensemble based on education, refuge and spirituality of any form. A mediator bridges the gap between church and library. Small interventions, connected through a central access tower provide space to people in need.The newly thought Predigerareal supports a coexistence of education, shelter and spirituality.
An unconditional refuge.
Lea Muttoni
FS 2022 Re form
Neue Kirche Fluntern
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
Referring to Lucius Burckhardts ‘Der kleinstmögliche Eingriff’ written in the 1980s, the project aims to de-objectify the Marriott Hotel that is located at the most central locations, yet remains mostly unnoticed by the cities’ inhabitants. In the sense of Burckhardts aesthetic survey, the project follows six paths that lead up to the many entrances of the building and proposed the smallest possible interventions to initiate transformation. By promoting a change in perception of the building and its relationship to the urban landscape the buildings strength of accessibility can once again be valued. It could then become a space for the public that ultimately prevents it from demolition.
Zitrone Dietikon
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
Food has been the basis of social production and military activity since ancient times, but now, with the help of industrialisation and mass production, how food moves from the soil to the table has faded from our view. How to open up the unreachable Engrosmarkt, Zurich's largest wholesale market for vegetables and fruit, to the society and bring the topic of food to the forefront，is my starting point.
The new interventions include three parts: Producer Market, Productive kitchen and Composting. They are positioned at different stages of food flow chain, supporting seasonal and regional food, minimizing food waste and at the same time serving the whole city. By reassembling the re-use building materials from Parkhaus hardturm on the opposite side in a similar but different way, the three parts will give a new character to the otherwise cold logistic centre through the use of colour, providing a real stage to celebrate food and for public to be aware of and understand food and our connection with the earth.
Chelsea Hotel
Making Plans for Living
David Eckert / Florian von Planta
HS 2020 Making Plans for Living, Zürich
Cave Paintings, 25000 BCE until today
Live: What is Next?
Seminar week 19–23 October 2020
A few semesters ago the studio tentatively made moves towards modernism. The evident failure of architecture to address the imbalance of contemporary life provided the motivation to look again at the more ideological and programmatic promises of modernism, particularly the second wave of the 60s and 70s, whose discourses were broadened to encompass themes of gender, the legacies of empire and the growing imbalances in our environment. The consumer driven economy and its insatiable consumption of precious resources is not sustainable, and the desires it claims to fill can never be satisfied. We need to shift our attention to things that give us purpose and happiness. What should we be doing, and how can we have fulfilling lives?
From our new home in Zürich Oerlikon we will meet and debate, both in person and on Zoom, a wide range of figures who are challenging the status quo of technique, economics and politics. We will both declare our existence to the wider world and also call for participation from beyond the limits of academia. The idea is that this intense week of research and outreach will supplement the ongoing themes of the studio, forming the basis of an interactive screen based journal and a special edition reader.
For the week we are collaborating with the Architecture Foundation, who is presenting and streaming the discussions throughout the week and who makes them accessible to rewatch on their YouTube channel.
HS 2020, ETH Zürich, Studio Caruso
What is it worth?
Download Book
Society and the Image
Diego Bazzotti / Arko Naroyan
HS 2019 Society and the Image, Zürich
Download Booklet
PDF 97 MB
Public Building
Mirjam Kupferschmid / Guy Keller
FS 2019 Public Building, Zürich
Rusakov Workers’ Club, Konstantin Melnikow
Moskau, 1928
Hidden Interiors
Patricia Bachmann / Laura Ferreira Dos Santos
HS 2018 Hidden Interiors, Zürich
Villa Meyer, Le Corbusier
Paris, 1925
The Ideal City
Francesco Battaini / Alessia Bertini
FS 2018 The Ideal City, Albisgüetli
Linear City, Arturo Soria y Mata / Ivan Leonidov
Madrid / Magnitogorsk, 1897/1930
Describing Beauty
Juliette Martin
HS 2017 Describing Beauty, Zürich
Ragamala
India, 1720
Structure and Society
Alcide Bähler / Caroline Lütjens
FS 2017 Structure and Society, Zürich
Palace of Culture
Warschau, 1955
Social Structure
Rebecca Konnertz
HS 2016 Social Structure, Graubünden
Building & Place Inventory
Graubünden
