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

The beauty of care and the grace of hosting are deeply rooted in the human nature. In the small village of Rüti, the threads of architecture and agriculture gently weave together.

At the heart of this lies empowerment and the importance of a connected social fabric.. Over time, care has evolved into a powerful, life-sustaining force, blending domestic, reproductive, and productive labor. Creating spaces for gathering becomes an act of resistance, spaces where public life and care intertwine. Over time, these spaces transform into places of communal return. By reimagining care as collective, we begin to envision new systems, ones built not on isolation, but on interdependence.

Despite their historic coexistence, architecture and agriculture have drifted apart. In Rüti, this separation is evident in the lack of infrastructure for communal gatherings, harvesting celebrations, or just the simple life. At the same time, the built environment remains tailored to narrow age groups, making it increasingly difficult to foster long-term residency, particularly in the context of an aging society and future generations yet to come. How do we reconnect across age and time - interweaving the threads of care and the act of hosting?

The dining table becomes a powerful metaphor for this shift - a central site of gathering, nourishment, and connection. As an instrument of care, the historical concept of the Konsumverein - 19th-century consumer cooperatives that laid the groundwork for the Genossenschaft model - is reintroduced. These self-managed collectives enabled workers, farmers, and civil servants to bypass commercial markets and ensuring access to essential goods. In this, local food production, fairness, and mutual care become acts of resistance and renewal. The urban kitchen -no longer just a place to cook- becomes a social tool of care. It challenges the nuclear family model, addressing issues of care, gender, and age. Shared domestic spaces begin to blur the boundaries between living and working, private and public. In this shift, care is no longer attached to the home - it becomes part of the public realm.

Within this landscape of care, figures like the healer and midwife reemerge - symbols of feminine knowledge and empowerment, deeply tied to natural medicine and traditional herbal practices. This connects care to the land, to healing, and to the quiet power of nature. These small gestures of growing, cooking, and eating together- form the blueprint for a new way of living. By desinging homes that are inclusive and intergenerational, its possible to incite people of all ages to live, work, and care under one roof at a metaphorical table.

Hosting becomes more than shelter - it is an act of memory and comfort - extending and taking care of both people and nature. These are spaces of communal return, where the roles of guest and host, caregiver and receiver, dissolve into mutuality. By gently layering new architectural gestures onto existing built environment, architecture and agriculture begin to intertwine, giving rise to a new social fabric. Fine threads of intervention - nearly invisible - accumulate into a resilient fabric of care. 

 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.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

PDF  5 MB

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.

PDF  139 MB

The aim of the KW Walzmühle project is to restore the existing buil- dings of the Alpenbrückli complex and introduce new infras- tructures in order to re-activate the site and its reach onto the surrounding area and its population. The implementation of a bold communal hall linking the former grain silo and the old mill is meant to generate an intermediate space that could be used by the new users of the complex as well as the daily passers-by from the region. The site is in close proximity to the centre of Glarus as well as the train tracks and stands on a pedestrian path that sees a daily flux of users crossing the old mill factory thus making it a place with a high potential for social & commercial gatherings as well as a distribution node for locally produced goods.

The new site would offer a new commercial hub for the city of Glarus, allowing local producers & suppliers to gather in a centralised environment where each could benefit from the experience and networks of each other. The goal is to introduce a variety of co- working spaces, showrooms as well as storage facilities that could enable national and international investors and distributors to come and meet in person with a broader range of small to me- dium-scale producers in order to facilitate the export of locally produced goods across the rest of the country as well as beyond our borders. The importance of the local economy and locally sourced productions is becoming a critical part of fair trade poli- cies as well as the development of suburban regions that develop products further away from economic centres such as Zurich.

Diverse state entities and private companies have already taken the challenge to boost the economy of smaller companies and expand the reach of new start-ups and producers outwards of the valley in order to bring the region to a more competitive state in opposition to the country‘s leading food distributors like Coop and Migros. These mega companies control the majority of Switzerland‘s food market and thus possess an essential influen- ce on the prices and distribution networks of goods across the country making it very difficult for smaller companies to maintain a sustainable business and push their products onto the Swiss market on their own.

PDF  66 MB

Download Book

PDF  46 MB

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.

PDF  46 MB

PDF  13 MB

PDF  15 MB

Reuse of Waste into new use

Food is the one of the most central topics and relevant to climate change that we are facing, because it embedded in the daily life of everyone and closely connected with the big climate and ecological context. Its impact in the social, political and economical scale force us to rethink the way of dealing huge food circle. The future food production is about reproduction. Thousands tons of food waste is producing in the building site of HERDERN areal every day. Since all of the bio-waste can be easily treated with modern industry and reused as bio-fertiliser, it brings a huge economical potential to the fruit market of the site.

Productivity dances with public life together

The Architecture sets out to deliver an image of coming life of new Zurich, an inspiring environment in which to have a special experience of a sustainable civic life. The spirit of the proposal starts with the circumstance of the project as an important fruit and vegetables logistic centre at the old Zurich industrial area, where almost like a forgotten place of the city during the day, as nearly the activities of the site happens in the midnight. The new adding program aims to work with the existing logistic function of the site together, and bring the daily civic life into it.

Machines and garden

The design is conceived as an idealised vision of factory, bringing together production activities and landscape in an almost Arcadian composition of machines and gardens. To largely respect the existing program of the site, not to obstacle the current use, the new intervention is proposed to sit on the old building. Logistic space of upper floor of existing building will be incorporated into a new arrangement with productive machines in between, where old construction will be continued and reinforced. A productive public garden will occupy the whole top floor with new roof structure. The workers at the site will be the beneficial owner of the new interventions, since the waste of the existing site is the main source of the upper production, which makes profit for the both sides. The public will see in the factory an interconnected program that delivering a big image of living being in the every phase of life circle in a symbiotic garden around. The Garden is proposed to connect the existing public activities in the Brache along the Limmat river, and to be a destination and a meeting point for citizens as the new city takes shape slowly around it.

PDF  95 MB

Download Books

Book Final Submission
PDF  331 MB

Book Pin Up 2
PDF  73 MB

Download Book

Network = Networth
PDF  97 MB

Download Booklets

Index
PDF  551 KB

Document 01
PDF  13 MB

Document 02
PDF  33 MB

Folder
PDF  22 MB

Wall
PDF  20 MB