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

The project proposes to convert and extend two underused buildings in the village into senior housing as an alternative to traditional retirement homes. The design emphasizes generous outdoor spaces and a strong connection to agriculture. The goal is to keep elderly residents physically and mentally active by involving them in farming activities. The two buildings are linked by a covered walkway that runs through an agroforestry area. Along this path are both productive and leisure facilities designed for seniors. This approach embraces ageing not as a decline, but as a meaningful phase of life, rooted in the community, the care and the rhythms of the land. 

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.

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Chair of Architecture and Construction
Adam Caruso
The project is presented as a folder, a collection of stories, architectural details, and material understanding, to provide information about the handling of the building and propose a resource for an ongoing transformation. The pages and stories can be rearranged, offering multiple readings and interpretations of the building, architectural fragments, and the interventions.

The research project engages with the hotel building known as Marriott that opened in the 1970s as an autonomous object in the city center of Zurich.The research unfolded stories about the building from contact with the original architect of the building, the interior designers, and the Head of Engineering who has worked in the building for over 25 years. Since the opening of the hotel, the idea of a «complete work of art» has been defiant. Over the years, the building underwent numerous modifications and transformations, revealing mutable versions of itself to keep up with the changing trends in hotel architecture.The generic new interiors have alienated the building’s interior from its shell. Each trend lasts for a generation and is custom- made for international hotel guests.The real users of the building, the workers, are thereby overlooked.The spatial separation between the front and back of the house is disproportionate.

The light touch aims to transform unused or historically interesting spaces in the hotel by critically reframing the existing layers and instrumentalising what is there.The actions are planned following the skill and expertise of the Engineering Team members of Marriott who have been in charge of every change ever made. Each space is appropriated to a new programme to tell the stories I encountered and reveal (im)material values that the building holds. Old, intermediate, and new layers create new atmospheres that are characterful to reconnect the hotel to its users and stay relevant in the future.

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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.

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The design proposes the conversion of the former parking garage of CIBA (Chemical Industry Basel). Today, the building is owned by Novartis and can only be used by its employees. The building is the only one of the available buildings situated on public land. Following the imminent departure of Novartis, the building is expected to be subject to the so-called „Heimfall“, whereby it will become property of the city.
The context is characterised by a high rate of foreigners, young people and low-income earners. The existing neighborhoods are organising themselves surprisingly well despite difficult conditions. There is a strong liveliness, which can be observed in numerous social and cultural institutions and their high frequency of visitors.
With the planned reorganisation of the former CIBA area, large-scale changes and gentrification processes are to be expected, which will lead to rising rents and eventually displacement.
In order to provide the local people with a public space of opportunity, a "Volkshaus" for Klybeck is to be initiated as an interface between the existing and new developments. In the spirit of the "Volkshäuser" of the emancipatory motivated labour movement around 1900, the project is organised on its own initiative in the form of a newly founded association.
In order to support the process of appropriation by the users, a temporal factor is included in the project: at no point should there be an end to the design process. Uses and interventions influence each other, the project is constantly in motion. This also corresponds to the structural logic of the existing building. The ramp system of the double helix emphasises a continuous space, which becomes a place of community. The regular structure of the building is overlayed with specific situations on a human scale. The monumental structure stands self-confidently along Horburgpark and uses its existing representational power.

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Following Traces
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Booklet
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