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

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. 

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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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Familiar strangers proposes a scenario that slowly transforms the hotel and its management style, learning from the daily disruptions and misuses. Alterations spread over time are accumulated on top of each other, creating and discovering other uses of the building. After all, embracing change is one of the core values of Marriott.

Like stage sets, hotels and their lobbies catch attention and provide a backdrop for human interactions. Rather than forcing contact between guests, a new model is put into place by letting visible traces of usage: objects are slowly put on display, voluntarily or not, and become screens onto which imaginative stories of lives past and present can be projected. Temporary kinships are created, and the building and its users become familiar strangers. Gradually, the rooms are transformed into something that can be different and the building is reconnected to the city, fulfilling Marriott’s global vision for the hotel to be “Zurich’s inspiring place, where brilliance connects people.”

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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 environment of a building is under continuous social, economic and technological change. What role does the construction of a building play in the process of these environmental changes? Do new usage requirements inevitably lead to a complete replacement of the building, or can they be converted to make them suitable for the new environment? Can CIBA’s existing welfare building from 1957 fin a changed form even play an innovative, identity-creating role in a newly developed quarter?

Observing the existing has pushed me to choose the new paradigm of a personal comfort-adaptive architecture thanks to which I have created a new art of participatory inhabitation. My project highlights the importance of adaptability and flexibility in design. The doctorands are free to shift, adjust and divide the spaces based on their personal needs through flexible partitions (i.e. layers and walls). In addition, the flexibility of the layers and the controlled / uncontrolled spaces allow the doctorands to regulate the thermal conditions within the entire building.

To a large extent, CIBA’s welfare building built in 1957 is left close to its original state, with small-scale interventions and adaptations. Innovation and research are part of CIBA’s welfare house’s identity – they have always been and will remain. The doctorand’s house aims to be a place where innovation and research can flourish, a doctorand’s house that is perfectly adaptable to the needs of the individual as well as of the community.

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