ETH Zürich   Studio Adam CarusoETH Zürich  Studio Adam CarusoETH Zürich  Studio A. CarusoETHZ   Studio Caruso

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

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