Redesigning Museums
Redesigning Museums
Introduction 19 September 2023, 9.30am
The last forty years have been a great success for museums and for museum architects. Never have so many of these institutions been constructed in so many different places. Their popularity reflects the global expansion of tourism and the pressure for cities and towns to develop their attractions. The financialization of art has meant that as collectors and their collections have immeasurably expanded, so too must the provision of museums.
Zurich has three significant examples of this phenomenon; Museum Rietberg (Grazioli and Krischanitz 2007), the Löwenbräu Areal (Gigon Guyer 2014) and the Kunsthaus (Chipperfield 2020) Each was expanded and restructured in response to specific conditions, yet all are part of this general global tendency. Whilst museum extensions are always sold as being about making more of the collection accessible to a wider public (and thanks to the support of generous benefactors), in the last decade the critique of these platitudes has intensified. The continued elitism of most cultural institutions, both in terms of their staff and their audiences, the racism and sexism inherent in their collections and institutional structures, and the nefarious origins of their collections, are now impossible to avoid and museums themselves have acknowledged that things must change.
So, what can we do about a problem like museums? We could just blow them up and start again, but that would not be very sustainable, and confronting historical problems is always more productive than erasing them. This semester we will redesign the museum, making projects that test the capacity of architecture to address historic bias in the content of museums, and social exclusion in their buildings. We will not embark on a search for the ideal museum but will rather closely engage with the trio of Zurich museums; talking to the people who run them, participating as visitors in their exhibitions and programmes. Guided by past and present disruptors in the art world, for example, the Guerrilla Girls (1985-), Group Material (1979-96), and ruangrupa (2000-) we will make concrete proposals to ‘hack’ both the organisation as well as the architecture of the museums. Our aim is to make projects where the museum and its collections more closely reflect and engage with the societies that they are a part of - with the community of Zurich in 2023.
Introduction: 19 September 2023, 9.30 am, location to be announced
The integrated discipline Construction is included in this course.
HS 2023, ETH Zürich, Studio Caruso
Emilie Appercé, Tibor Bielicky, Adam Caruso, Claudio Schneider, Barbara Thüler
Paris, le trottoir et la plage
Seminar Week: October 23–27, 2023
Expansive boulevards, formal gardens, infinite arcades, limestone facades and zinc roofs – the 19th century historic core of Paris appears immutable and more than a little hermetic. The grand cultural institutions embedded within the city – the Louvre, Palais Garnier, La Comédie Française, Musée du quai Branly – have an imperious presence consistent with their monumentality and an authority bestowed by the centralised structures of power. Beside this republican weight, the citizens of France are notoriously practiced revolutionaries, with a readiness to protest and set things alight. These are not merely the actions of the mob, but rather developed political mechanisms supported and theorised by diverse networks of public intellectuals.
We will visit Paris to engage with its great institutions at a time of institutional crisis brought on by the ever-increasing acknowledgement of how the inequities of empire are still rotting at the core of contemporary life. By interrogating the origins of collections and the stories they tell we will try to discern what can replace a discredited western canon. We will have this discussion with the members of those institutions and equally with cultural activists working at the periphery, the places where the stone runs out but where culture, learning and society can experiment with new forms. Our search will span from the 1st arrondissement to Pantin, where Emily in Paris meets la Haine.
The costs are 501–750 CHF including transportation within the city, one dinner, entrances and reader.
Category C, 16 students
HS 2023, ETH Zürich, Studio Caruso
Emilie Appercé, Tibor Bielicky, Adam Caruso, Claudio Schneider, Barbara Thüler
Diploma HS 2023
Unschöne Museen
While its effectiveness as an instrument of social change can be questioned, architecture plays a central role in making the spaces and symbols of power. If institutions embody the values of the societies from which they emerge, it is architects who imagined how these structures can project power and be instruments of social control. Within the inventory of public institutions, from tombs to parliaments, custom houses to prisons, the museum seems a benevolent member of the family, caring for precious objects, giving wider and deeper access to society’s treasures. The last four decades have seen a physical and programmatic expansion of museums that has made them an important part of the contemporary city’s image and economy, at the same time as engaging with ever larger and more diverse audiences. Architects have been implicated in these transformations, becoming increasingly active parts of these expanded global cultural networks.
After this heyday, we are now witnessing a wide-reaching revision of the museum as we know it. Beyond the efforts of institutional critique, the museum today is no longer regarded as a site of beauty or spectacle, but rather as a problem context calling for repair. Until recently, the world of art and architecture enduringly published and advocated the promise of the museum of the future. Today, the lens through which we view this institution is tainted and a review of the museum as an institution is back on the table. The museum remains a place of classification, and therefore of exclusion and of often obscure structural dependencies between the institution and its stakeholders. The museum has revealed itself as a site of violence, its architecture and operations reinforcing societal inequality.
This year the overall theme of the diploma is expanding to explicitly encompass social as well as physical sustainability, with its reference to the United Nations’ SDG 11 for Sustainable Cities and Communities. Our studio will respond to the ongoing revision of museums by closely investigating a group of Swiss collection-based museums, as a way of better understanding the relationship between specific social situations, their institutions, and cultural artefacts. We will engage in detail with the human, material and spatial relationships that characterise these museums and the constituencies that they encompass.
We will meet the people who run and use these museums and will have workshops with historians and critics who are developing effective institutional critiques of the contemporary museum. With this granular knowledge about the social as well as the material conditions of these public buildings, the design phase of the diploma will develop designs that transform the extent, organisation and the displays of collections, framing them in new ways with architectures that enable the content, the experience and the social relevance of the museum to be rediscovered.
Diploma, HS 2023, ETH Zürich
Chair Caruso
Emilie Appercé, Adam Caruso, Barbara Thüler
gta exhibitions
Fredi Fischli, Niels Olsen, Geraldine Tedder
Re (Reframe, Rearrange, Repeat)
Re (Reframe, Rearrange, Repeat) - Final Review
June 01, 2023, 10:00 – 17.50
Thursday, June 1st, Second Day of Final Reviews, ETH Zürich, ONA E30
Guests: Verena von Beckerath, Stépahnie Dadour, Summer Islam, Oliver Lütjens
Re (Reframe, Rearrange, Repeat) - Final Review
May 31, 2023, 09:00 – 17.35
Wednesday, May 31st, First Day of Final Reviews, ETH Zürich, ONA E30
Guests: Verena von Beckerath, Stépahnie Dadour, Summer Islam, Oliver Lütjens
Re (Reframe, Rearrange, Repeat) - Final Review
May 31 / June 1, 2023
Wednesday, May 31st and Thursday, June 1st, Final Reviews
09:00, ETH Zürich, ONA E30
Guests: Verena von Beckerath, Stéphanie Dadour, Summer Islam, Oliver Lütjens
Re (Reframe, Rearrange, Repeat) - Studio Review 2
May 02 / 03, 2023
Tuesday, May 2nd and Wednesday, May 3rd, Studio Review
09:00 – 17:15, ETH Zürich, ONA E30
Guests: Saida Brückner, Géraldine Recker, Angelika Hinterbrandner
Re (Reframe, Rearrange, Repeat) - Studio Review 1
March 15, 2023
Wednesday, March 15th, Studio Review, ETH Zürich, ONA E30, 09:15 – 15:15
Guest: Geraldine Tedder
Re (Reframe, Rearrange, Repeat)
Introduction: 21 February 2023, 09am
This semester we will continue our return to the tangible. Working on underused industrial sites in Zurich we will re-introduce large scale programmes of production, care and agriculture, alongside places for working and living. By engaging in detail with existing situations and developing new architectures of intensification and addition we will try to find convincing alternatives to the expansion of the agglomeration.
Architecture that responds to current challenges cannot only be a matter of upcycling and the adaptive re-use of existing structures. These are important themes, but for architecture to continue to be culturally relevant 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 reframe how we think about architecture we will study the ideas and work of six artists. The work of Beverly Buchanan and Robert Smithson suggest productive relationships between sculpture and an expanded idea of archaeology. Sturtevant and Jeff Wall work in the territory between painting and history. Michael Asher and Sherrie Levine articulate and challenge the relationship between production and the institution. These practices all respond to different conditions but are 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: 21 February 2023, 09:00 am,
location to be announced
FS 2023, ETH Zürich, Studio Caruso
Emilie Appercé, Tibor Bielicky, Adam Caruso, Claudio Schneider, Barbara Thüler
Labour, wealth and its image
Seminar Week: March 20–24, 2023
Rapacious coalmines, sublime factories, wasted landscapes; art academies, patrons’ homes, influential collections: the Rhein-Ruhr is a tightly woven fabric of all of these. In the urban conurbation and its industrial hinterland, the sources of 20th century wealth exist alongside environmental devastation that can no longer be ignored. The whole of this history can be read in the work of Hilla and Bernd Becher, and in the work of their students from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
Based in Düsseldorf, we will retrace the steps of the Bechers. We will visit sites of material extraction and industrial production, as well as places where the consequences of these activities are being addressed. We will also visit places where this wealth was spent: the houses of collectors, their collections, and the museums built to accommodate them.
This central site of the Wirtschaftswunder is a powerful place to observe the mechanisms of capital, and culture’s role within capitalist society, and we will try to understand what these conditions could mean for the 21st century.
Eating well and having good conversations are an integral part of the week.
The costs are 501–750 CHF including entrances, accommodation, one dinner and reader.
Category C, 16 students
FS 2023, ETH Zürich, Studio Caruso
Emilie Appercé, Tibor Bielicky, Adam Caruso, Claudio Schneider, Barbara Thüler
Diploma FS 2023
Labour Reframed
A large number of historic structures in Switzerland are connected to industry, a reflection of the early and significant industrialisation of the country. The survival of these structures individually and in groups is related to the continuing importance of industrial production in the Swiss economy. Nonetheless, many factories, mills and storage buildings from the 20th century are underused or stand empty. The most magnificent of these, with their promise of universal and conceptually open structures are distant relations to the Crystal Palace of 1851, an early and influential statement of smooth, capitalist space. The colours, ornament and spatial arrangements for Joseph Paxton’s endless structure were designed by Owen Jones, the author of the Grammar of Ornament a work that in 1856 laid out a paradoxical relation between culturally based ornament and global capitalism.
We will engage with a collection of these underused industrial structures in the eastern part of Switzerland, to consider how they can once more be a productive part of contemporary life at the same time as retaining their presence as historic monuments that act as instruments of continuity within an ever changing built environment.
The Chairs of Caruso and Delbeke will together engage with these complex themes. The research phase of the diploma will compile a new Grammar of Ornament where students will have the opportunity to collect, research and represent new constellations of form spanning from the ancient world to the present. This new Grammar will be guided by a written essay that each student will use to position their project within a larger argument. The preparation phase will also include a close survey of the existing buildings including an analysis and mapping of how people and processes were originally accommodated. The second phase will apply these lessons to the design of major additions and intensifications of a collection of existing industrial structures, adding a grammar of energy and construction to that of history and ornament. Our goal is to discover the beauty that is held within the age of upcycling.
Diploma, FS 2023, ETH Zürich
Chair Caruso
Emilie Appercé, Adam Caruso, Claudio Schneider
Chair Delbeke
Matthew Critchley, Maarten Delbeke
Reframe, Rearrange, Repeat
Reframe, Rearrange, Repeat - Final Review
December 21, 2022, 09:15 – 19.00
Wednesday, December 21st, Second Day of Final Reviews, ETH Zürich, ONA E30
Guests: Anne Femmer, Marina Olsen, Florian Summa
Reframe, Rearrange, Repeat - Final Review
December 20, 2022, 09:00 – 18.45
Tuesday, December 20th, First Day of Final Reviews, ETH Zürich, ONA E30
Guests: Anne Femmer, Peter Fischli, Florian Summa
Reframe, Rearrange, Repeat - Final Review
December 20 / 21, 2022
Tuesday, December 20th and Wednesday, December 21st, Final Reviews
09:30 – 19:00, ETH Zürich, ONA E30
Guests: Anne Femmer, Peter Fischli, Marina Olsen, Florian Summa
Reframe, Rearrange, Repeat - Studio Review 2
November 29, 2022
Tuesday, November 29th, Studio Review, ETH Zürich, ONA E30, 08:30 – 19:55
Guests: Adrien Compte (Compte / Meuwly), Tina Küng (DU Studio)
Reframe, Rearrange, Repeat - Studio Review 1
October 12, 2022
Wednesday, October 12th, Studio Review, ETH Zürich, ONA E30, 09:00 – 16:30
Guest: Isabel Seiffert
Re form
Despite multiple historic transformations in the past, Altstetten Church today benefits from being protected (as a monument from demolition) and simultaneously being a protector for the community of the church and other minorities. Currently, outside these fortifying walls, the Neighborhood in Altstetten is witness to a lot of change and many of its current programs need to close or move out of the area. By intensifying the potential of the church, the hill behind Lindenplatz can be used as a carrier bag for what will be removed and demolished. In punctual interventions, chapter by chapter, the Church is altered to convene to these programs. Each adding new life to the existing yet underused spaces of the church, and thus inviting new people and communities inside it.
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 Projects HS 2021
Submission of the Diploma Projects
January 13, 2022
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.
Live: What is Next?
Seminar week 19–23 October 2020
A few semesters ago the studio tentatively made moves towards modernism. The evident failure of architecture to address the imbalance of contemporary life provided the motivation to look again at the more ideological and programmatic promises of modernism, particularly the second wave of the 60s and 70s, whose discourses were broadened to encompass themes of gender, the legacies of empire and the growing imbalances in our environment. The consumer driven economy and its insatiable consumption of precious resources is not sustainable, and the desires it claims to fill can never be satisfied. We need to shift our attention to things that give us purpose and happiness. What should we be doing, and how can we have fulfilling lives?
From our new home in Zürich Oerlikon we will meet and debate, both in person and on Zoom, a wide range of figures who are challenging the status quo of technique, economics and politics. We will both declare our existence to the wider world and also call for participation from beyond the limits of academia. The idea is that this intense week of research and outreach will supplement the ongoing themes of the studio, forming the basis of an interactive screen based journal and a special edition reader.
For the week we are collaborating with the Architecture Foundation, who is presenting and streaming the discussions throughout the week and who makes them accessible to rewatch on their YouTube channel.
HS 2020, ETH Zürich, Studio Caruso
Society and the Image
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