Zurich Monuments
The Pleasure in Small Things
Final Discussions & Exhibition
December 16, 2025
Tuesday, December 16th, Exhibition & Discussions, ETH Zürich, ONA E30, 08:00 – 19:00
Guests: Monster Chetwynd, Pierre Chèvremont, Tuukka Laurila, Nora Walter
Restaging – Reimagining: Exhibition and Discussions
October 15, 2025
Wednesday, October 15th, Exhibition & Discussions, ETH Zürich, ONA E30, 10:00 – 17:00
Diploma FS 2026
Architecture School
The FAU (1969) designed by Vilanova Artigas was an expression of the radical Paulista architecture school of the 1960s, and Gund Hall (1972) designed by John Andrews had similar grand ambitions. The HIL building tells a very different story, accidentally becoming the department of architecture when the ETH administration decided it was best to remove architecture students from the city centre where they had become too involved in the youth protests of the 1970s. The ugly brown building has never been much of an expression of our school’s desires.
This semester we will use the diploma project to explore how the HIL building can be re-structured to be a base for the department, and a more hospitable and sustainable place to meet and work. Since it is unlikely that the present labyrinth could be improved by enlargement, our efforts will be to concentrate the existing, making it lighter, clearer and more flexible.
We will also study examples of more dispersed and non-institutional learning, like Anna Halprin’s Dance Deck and Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument, places that demonstrate how learning can be more flexible and responsive to both its students and to ever changing educational contexts. We will combine the idea of a central base with mutable cells, spaces in and around the city that can more closely engage with the diverse people and situations of Zurich and beyond. By working both with the centre and the non-centre, perhaps we can start to imagine an architecture school fit for the 21st century.
We will continue to collaborate with Newrope in three ‘rooms of entanglement’, workshops where content, process and place are considered in an expanded forum.
Preparation phase:
-study of alternative places of education and the preparation of journals that compile the sites, programmes and central qualities of these open and more flexible schools.
-preparation of glossaries of learning.
-preparation of atlas of the HIL building and of possible non-central sites for the future department of architecture.
Elaboration phase:
-development of specific design proposals that incorporate new programmes and ideas of learning for the new department of architecture.
Diploma, FS 2026, ETH Zürich
Chair Caruso
Emilie Appercé, Tibor Bielicky, Adam Caruso
Newrope
Ellena Ehrl, Freek Persyn
Diploma FS 2025
Linthal, located at the end of the Glarus valley, carries a rich agricultural and industrial heritage that is still visible in its built environment, marked today by many underused or vacant buildings. Once a vibrant rural hub, it now bears the character of a transit zone, with essential services found only further down the valley. Yet within this apparent emptiness lies the potential for renewal. The unique landscape and close-knit scale of the village invite new ideas for how people might live, work, and engage with nature. Linthal is not defined by the anonymity of cities but by community spirit, resilience, and a deep connection to the land. Qualities that can become the foundation for a future shaped by sustainable agricultural practices and a strengthened rural collaboration.
In order to create and maintain such a regenerative farming concept a new actor is introduced that concentrates the responsibility for administrative and organizational as well as distributary questions in one figure. Various agents are part of a regenerative farm and ask therefore for the orchestration of the system cycles. With the One Roof Cooperative a contact point occurs. Combining two associations under one large roof: the farmer’s and the gardener’s association, the cooperative fosters dialogue, support, sharing and negotiations. Located in a former farmhouse, it connects Linthal’s traditions on several levels. Remnants in the ambient land evoke the presence of hidden networks and practices that are then illustrated by these artefacts. Some of them still fulfilling a purpose, some being reprogrammed and others standing their ground as artworks.
All together form a composition that allows people to experience natural landscapes and agricultural practices in a humble way without being disturbed. The scenery is about celebrating what is already there, identifying the potential and making it productive again. This does not solely imply economic profit, but more significantly the enhancement of communal identity and the collective appreciation of rural traditions and crafts.
Architecturally speaking, the former housing unit is transformed into the administrative interface of the cooperative, while the barn part gets a clear communal and production or processing based orientation. Together they break with the linearity that was predominant in Linthal before and where everything passed through. Now it invites us to stay, learn, exchange knowledge and spend time appreciating the land and its advantages. Increasing energies all over the village come together in the farmhouse, get refined and then distributed to customers and interested parties. The large roof provides not only symbolic shelter from weather conditions for the program. It is also offering a space for gathering, for festivities and workshops, allowing for engagement in agricultural practices and the celebration of simple but honest joy of high-quality products. It is embodying the love for nature and tradition and shows its appreciation for handicraft, in architecture and in agriculture.
By not being fully insulated, the building questions the spatial needs architecture has to provide in a rural and food processing setting. Therefore, the project challenges how architects could work with existing buildings and proposes settle adjustments that blend in seamlessly while still showing that something is happening.
Diploma HS 2024
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 FS 2024
The Anna Göldi Museum is located in Ennenda and is housed in the historic attic of the former Hänggiturm. It is barely recognizable from the outside and only the large letters ANNA on the chimney indicate that the museum is situated on the Trümpi site. The museum does not only tells a forgotten story of witches and women from another time, but also recalls the global influence and power of the textile industry in Switzerland.
In the first phase of the research, I looked at the content of the exhibition in the Anna Göldi Museum and took a closer look at the textile industry around Ennenda. As my grandmother was one of the workers in the Uznach spinning mill, I chose a very personal and intuitive research method. In the book Untold Stories I collected tellings of different women and recorded them as a collage in my book. The collected material is very diverse and highlights specific aspects that the women experienced and that concerned me. The aim was not to find a single truth, but to use the medium of the artist book to make them visible side by side without judging them.
On the ground floor of the museum, an additional program is to be provided that the residents of Ennenda can use and appropriate the space. As an exhibition, the women in my book have been given a space as a reminder of them and what they have experienced. Each of these spaces has a domestic character and does not correspond to the authoritarian character of a typical museum. Everyone should find their own access to the museum and new stories should be able to develop side by side in this new place.
In addition, a new park is to be created, which will become a visible center in Ennenda where people can meet or simply go for a walk. A water basin and a pavilion are located in the spacious area and give the outdoor area its character. The structures are simply designed, showcase the traditional craftsmanship of the area and provide another space for the clubs in Ennenda to appropriate and benefit from.
Diploma HS 2023
Diploma FS 2023
Empty hall, machines gone, workers disappeared… forgotten by time, fortunes of dozens mills in Glarus, ghosts of the grandiose industrialisation, despite the collective fame of Glarus industry.
The labourers, who had devoted their whole lives in the mills, have faded out the line of sight of people, so as their single stories. Today, the columns has become the only witness of the past everyday life, with the names of the silent nobodies, which exposes their unspoken wishes to be remembered. There are thousands of concealed individual ordinary stories to be discovered under the collective glorious one.
The house of memory, a place, where the echos of old industry are going to be collected, while the new creative chapters are in process. A living chronicle of the local industrial past, composed of an archive filled by locals, as well as a research centre and atelier for scholars, artists, designers and entrepreneurs form outside. It is an exhibition and celebration space for all, a new story to be continued by thousands of individual participations.
The house of memory is a bridge from the past to the future, honouring the industrial legacy of Glarus while inspiring innovation and creativity. We remember, we honour, we reimagine. Through remembering the past, we shape an open future.
Diploma HS 2022
Inspired by the trans material metamorphoses and the question: Double the building or building the double? The focus of my project shifted from the building I was first looking at to its less noticeable neighbour.
How can one become the double of the other? To achieve the transformation, the building is wrapped in a new façade that creates a new layer in front. The old walls are still perceptible in the interior as a fragment of the building’s former self, dividing the private parts from the communal spaces of the flats. The private rooms stay inside, in the old chore of the building, while the communal spaces are located in the new layer. Through this so generated extension and enlargement, a higher density can be achieved as the number of flats per floor are doubled and the quality of the space is enhanced. Through the extension the two buildings, before visually divided by the staircase, come to touch each other and the former staircase windows are incorporated in the communal spaces of the flat.
The building, now transformed, is read as the double of its neighbour without becoming it’s exact copy. The height, the grid’s proportions and the angle of the façade are slightly different as well as the façade construction. The concrete of one is translated in the wood construction of the other. Trough the silver painting of the wood the two different materials are perceived as the same from afar and only at a closer look the different textures are reviled. While the outside of the building tries to mimic the concrete façade construction of its neighbour, the wooden construction is explicitly shown in the interior, creating a contrast between the old and the new.
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
Diploma HS 2021
This project is a continuing dialog that aims at rendering visible the already existing, yet overlooked practices on site while re-attributing value to their process. It func- tions as an ongoing program of modification within the hotel framework that will better profit from the existing socio-cultural resources. A series of action and interven- tion varying in time and scale will generate a never-en- ding dialogue between the hotel and its actors in order to sustain change by fostering a light but durable change in the long term.
While remaining non-disruptive, a series of small-scale actions will reveal the value of the existing practices. With simple mean such as improving access to, or re- locating existing programs, light programmatic change will spread throughout the hotel while empowering their actors. New processes will be creating along the way al- lowing for the emergences of new relationship between the landmark and the social life of Zürich.
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
Dancing together apart re-evaluates the accessibility to food in cities, including the socio-cultural aspect around food rituals and spaces in communities. A proposition in three acts articulates different scales on the site of Engrosmarkt, from events to architectural interventions, as an ongoing research challenging the publicness of the industrial site.
The interventions gradually disrupt, alter, and modify some existing part of the site while using and misusing what is already built. The six physical infiltrations simultaneously happen with the emergence of a community life next to the sellers and truck drivers. Programs implicating each point of the city food chain arise alongside the market. Engrosmarkt becomes a laboratory working together but still apart with the existing flows.
Re-Use Ciba
What is it worth?
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