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
Diesbach was once a village that was home to generations of people from all walks of life. Following the relocation and closure of the textile factories in the Linth valley, demographic decline ensued, leaving vacant buildings behind after the workers had left.
Other factors also contributed to the decline in Diesbach's social life. The village shop, which used to be a place for villagers to share, had to close because it was no longer profitable. The village Gasthaus, which had a small bar-restaurant, also closed, leaving the villagers without a meeting place close to home.
This lack of meeting places quickly became apparent during our site visits, and was confirmed by the villagers we met.
But how can Diesbach be revitalised?
Thanks to our regenerative farm project in Diesbach, a new economic activity is emerging in the village. This farm of more than 100 hectares involves more than forty farmers and supplies a wide variety of local produce.
The former village shop building has been converted into a kitchen, restaurant and grocery shop. Products from our regenerative farm, as well as products from the Legler areal start-ups, are sold on site in a self-service shop, the pantry of the inhabitants of Diesbach.
These products are also prepared in the kitchen to create dishes available in three different ways. They are sold directly in the grocery shop for takeaway, they are also available by delivery for the village's elderly, and it is also possible to eat them on site in the Diesbach canteen, a place that brings together villagers, seasonal workers and new workers from the village. All generations from different working backgrounds come together in this place of sharing, which had disappeared and was so much appreciated by the villagers.
On the ground floor is the village's kitchen and pantry, which benefits both. The cooks use the pantry to prepare meals and also restock the shelves with takeaway food.
The first floor is accessible via a staircase that opens onto the public space to access the restaurant area. The staircase leads past a greenhouse, a reminder that the produce comes directly from the village and a foretaste of what's on the plates.
This greenhouse was once a garage that has now been transformed into a place for growing plants. The wooden structure of the existing garage is duplicated on either side of the building, like an extrusion of its original volume. The opaque cladding of the existing building is retained, while the two extensions to the building have a transparent polycarbonate cladding, to heat the space using the sun's rays.
A workshop and plants requiring little light are placed in the centre of the building, while those requiring more sunlight are located in the two extensions.
The Gasthaus, which faces the grocery shop and restaurant building, is home to seasonal workers in both summer and winter. During the warmer months, some of the civil servants are housed in this former gasthaus, which has been converted into a large WG. During the cold season, some of the seasonal workers from the Braunwald ski resort, 20 minutes away by public transport, can be accommodated in this WG when the fields no longer require as many workers.
The building mainly requires interior work, as its facades are iconic in this village and must not be altered.
A variety of rooms have been designed to meet different needs.
Rooms have been created on the first two floors, where the Gasthaus' communal areas used to be. On the second floor, bathrooms have been added to the existing rooms to add quality to what already existed. And under the magnificent wooden roof structure is the new common area of this large WG.
In this way, a place that had been neglected over the years has been reborn in a new light, with the arrival of a younger generation in the village, while at the same time responding to the wishes of the inhabitants who no longer felt considered following the unification of all the villages in the valley into one large municipality, Glarus Sud.
Diploma HS 2024
Since the start of the industrial revolution, the western social system has been built on constant growth. Growth in population, economic performance, technological capabilities, cultural output - no area of human life has been untouched by this dynamic.
But it can no longer be ignored that we are at a breaking point. The planetary boundaries have been reached or already exceeded in many areas. The climate crisis as well as the biodiversity crisis are both negative consequences of this system.
A change of course is therefore not only needed, but inevitable due to demographics. Demographic developments will radically transform the society we know. Even if it still seems to be a distant future in Switzerland at the moment, the population here will also start to shrink in a few decades, even in urban areas. This is already the case in many European countries, and there are also areas in Switzerland that have been shrinking for decades. The area around the Klausen Pass is just such an area.
This project examines two case studies on both sides of the Klausen Pass to find out what kind of architecture makes sense in a shrinking society. How can places be created that enable a sustainable form of growth and coexistence in such a location? On the Glarus side, a new scheme is proposed for the former woollen weaving mill in Rüti, while on the Uri side, an new approach is implemented in the former Gasthof St. Anton in Spiringen.
Such shrinking places have one advantage: the forces of the market are significantly weaker and projects that are not aimed at optimising profits also have a chance to thrive. There is an opportunity to utilise these places creatively through small interventions and make them usable for society.
The projects are characterised by the fact that they consist of a large number of small interventions that can be carried out without great expense over a longer period of time. If an intervention is a success, it can be built upon; if it is a failure, it can be reacted to. In this context, architecture is not understood as a project, but as a process.
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 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.
Diploma HS 2023
Diploma FS 2023
Diploma HS 2022
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
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.
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
The project explores the relationship of existing and intervention, the simultaneity of the market and storage as the current program and the sports center as a new form of cultural use are thematised and spatially intertwined.
Juxtaposition as an instrument to create complexities and contradictions. The tran- sitions between old and new, temporary and permanent, are consciously negated, leading to a new relationship of coexisting spaces without the enforcement of any external changes to the existing building.
Re-Use Ciba
What is it worth?
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Welche Heimat?
Society and the Image
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