The Village
The Village – Final Review
May 27, 2025
Tuesday, May 27th, Final Review, ETH Zürich, ONA E30, 08:00 – 18:30
Guests: Sébastien Marot, Myriam Marti, Grace Ndiritu
The Village – Studio Review 2
April 16, 2025
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
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
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
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 HS 2025
The Accidental Gartenstadt
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
Remoteness and Identity
The Klausenpass, where the project is located, is very strongly impacted by the different seasons. Indeed, the road closure due to the winter snow covering of the 1948m asl pass makes the place very different depending on the seasons.
The project then seeks to create two different uses, interweaving the different conditions of the surroundings and answering challenges both in winter and summer. In summer, the main focus is to provide a platform dwelling people high up around the pass, providing cheap manpower for the local farmers working in the nearby alps.
In winter, the project otherwise very close to the road become completely isolated. The people that stayed and worked there during summer can stay in the same building, but in a very different environment. As a counterpart -and retribution- to the work accomplished during summer, guided skitouring outings are organized. This way of being compensated for the summer work allows a more economically accessible way to learn mountain sports.
In a more practical way, the building is dimensioned according the the workforce need of the farmers during the summer season. In winter, the building shifts in hibernation mode: since there is less need of rooms, the groups staying there are smaller. The bottom floor is then covered in snow, and is only used again the next spring.
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
Re form
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
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
As the city of Zürich is growing, the industrial and publicly not accessible areas, such as the site of the Engrosmarket, are moving closer to the city center. How do we, in future, deal with such areas which are ideally situated for their main function as a distribution center but at the same time within immediate proximity to residential quarters?
By implementing regulating elements such as doors, stairs, lights, the site is transformed into an environment where public events such as concerts, flee markets, food festivals can take place at certain times during the day and week. These performative elements refer to existing elements found on the site allowing the Engrosmakert to function as a highly specialised machine for distributing fresh goods. Through re-interpreting these elements in a new way and repeated implementation, the Engrosmarket is being transformed allowing public functions to take place at certain times and thus be integrated in the network of the city.
Re-Use Ciba
With the world climate changing, resources getting scarce and humans exploiting nature, we need to rethink farming and how to change our behavior towards nature. We're not the only ones.
By using the existing storage building as a foundation, the project becomes a self sufficient machine, powered by solar energy. With the aquaponic system it is possible to harvest more and use less.
The big heart of the machine connects the lower existing part with the upper new housings - a cohabitational space offering a habitat for plants, animals and humans. Everything is connected, everything is necessary and plays a role in the whole.
Discover this cosmos of cohabitation and find yourself in richness and diversity. A symbiosis of plants, animals, humans, architecture and technology.
What is it worth?
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Welche Heimat?
Society and the Image
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