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

This semester will be an intentional return to the tangible. Working on a group of buildings around Helvetiaplatz in Zurich we will make projects for additions and transformations that substantially increase the capacity of these buildings and explicitly embrace making architecture. Using models and drawings we will develop and represent an architecture that is connected to our discipline’s long history of forms and techniques at the same time as being relevant today.

Architecture that addresses our current predicament cannot only be a matter of upcycling and the adaptive re-use of existing structures. Although these are important themes, for architecture to continue to be culturally productive we need to discover the beauty that lies within the environmental turn. One way of doing this is to reframe the ways we think about cultural production and challenge the idea of the work of art as an autonomous entity. By engaging directly with the contingencies of material life, perhaps then, can we make a substantial and culturally engaged architecture of today.

To help us reframe how we think about architecture we will study the ideas and work of six artists; Édouard Manet and Richard Prince, Auguste Rodin and Rachel Whiteread, Louise Lawler and Andrea Fraser. While admittedly very different, they all developed their work in ways that challenged the formal, social and institutional expectations of their times. While their practices respond to the conditions of different times, they are still relevant and speak powerfully to us today. The ideas, as well as the formal and material qualities of these artists’ work will inform our search for an architecture and a beauty for the 21st century.  

Construction as an integrated discipline is included in this course

Introduction: 20 September 2022, 09:00 am,
Helvetiaplatz, next to the Denkmal der Arbeit

HS 2022, ETH Zürich, Studio Caruso
Emilie Appercé, Tibor Bielicky, Adam Caruso, Claudio Schneider, Barbara Thüler

The paintings, cities and gardens of 15th century Italy can seem far away from our lives, but these artefacts produced with materials and ideas from another time are also part of the contemporary world. Near the border between Tuscany and Umbria, small cities like Pienza, Arezzo and Assisi offer the opportunity to experience objects and spaces from the early renaissance in their original settings. 

We will visit one or two of these special places each day. Using art history and theory texts from today, we will reframe, discuss and debate work that was made six or seven hundred years ago. We will try to understand something about how and why they were originally made, and begin to make sense of what they can mean to us today. 

Eating well and keeping good society will be an integral part of the week.

The costs are 501–750 CHF including entrances, accommodation, one dinner and reader.
Category C, 16 students

HS 2022, ETH Zürich, Studio Caruso
Emilie Appercé, Tibor Bielicky, Adam Caruso, Claudio Schneider, Barbara Thüler

Most of Zurich’s 49 protestant churches are underused, some of the largest like those at Enge and Wollishofen are only used during Easter and Christmas. Many of these churches are spatially generous and full of special qualities in their architecture and in their furnishing. They also encompass substantial precincts, some grittily urban and others park-like in character. The situation of almost empty churches is not unique to Zurich and is common throughout western European towns and cities.  

The rise of the consumer economy has resulted in a dramatic decline of free, publicly accessible interiors in Zurich. A place to eat a picnic lunch or simply to sit down and rest, affordable spaces for yoga class and book clubs, informal workplaces. The city’s churches provide shelter and care for society’s most vulnerable whatever their religion or nationality, and the reform church works closely with the city and other social providers in Zurich. However, a wider and more socially diverse use of this valuable stock of publicly scaled interiors in the city could radically transform the sense of ‘the public’ in Zurich.  

The semester will begin with the historically and architecturally rich fabric of these churches, closely surveying the physical at the same time as speculating how the tangible and the spiritual co-exist and support each other within the bodies of these structures. We will use drawing, modelmaking and time-based media to reframe the existing conditions of these churches as well as suggest where their potential for more intense use might lie. We will engage with the church’s current social programmes and make connections with other groups who are involved in activating the under-used spaces of the city. Using programme alongside spatial and material means, we will develop architectures that more fully realise the potential of this extensive social and spatial public resource that lies within the city.  

The projects that emerge during the course of the semester will be part of the Nexpo 2028 initiative, whose directors Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen will participate in the teaching and programming of the studio. 

Construction as an integrated discipline is included in this course 

FS 2022, ETH Zürich, Studio Caruso

Emilie Appercé, Tibor Bielicky, Adam Caruso, Claudio Schneider, Barbara Thüler 

The art of fifteenth century Florence is so well known that it should collapse into a cliché. Yet, when one encounters the paintings of Fra Angelico and Masaccio, the architecture of Alberti and Brunelleschi, the sculpture of Donatello, one can still be profoundly moved. This art can speak to complex emotional frailties in a way that gives meaning to the idea of humanism. It is a wonder that artists from such a long time ago had insights into human psychology, social mores and the economy and politics that still powerfully resonate today. 

During our visit to Florence we will visit a single work each morning, and another in the afternoon. We will spend time in these spaces so that we can register what they mean to us today. We will discuss the conditions of their production more than five hundred years ago, how the relationships between patrons, clients and artists in those time are enmeshed in the work and how these things still have relevance today. 

The costs are 501–750 CHF including transportation, accommodation, one dinner, entrances and reader. 

Category C, 16 students

FS 2022, ETH Zürich, Studio Caruso

Emilie Appercé, Tibor Bielicky, Adam Caruso, Claudio Schneider, Barbara Thüler