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

Dwelling is an activity—a dynamic process shaped by the flow of people. Linthal, in the canton of Glarus, once flourished through the textile industry but declined with its disappearance. Amid underused buildings in this quiet town, Kosthaus stands on a broad meadow in the valley.

Originating in the 19th century, the Kosthaus was a pragmatic housing model for industrial workers—marked by rationality, repetition, and minimal material use. Typically built as row houses, they prioritized efficiency over comfort.

This thesis explores the adaptive reuse of a former Kosthaus into a flexible housing model that accommodates short-, mid-, and long-term stays within one architectural framework. It aims to show how rural contexts can offer socially integrated, adaptable alternatives to urban housing—responding to contemporary shifts in labor, mobility, and community.

The Linthal Kosthaus includes four distinct units under one roof. Its original spatial logic—a sequence of compact, interconnected rooms—offers surprising potential. Rather than erasing these historical features, the project reclaims them as assets for reimagined collective living.

A new timber extension adds modular rooms divided by curtains, allowing residents to reconfigure spaces and mediate privacy and shared use. Openings in the original façade connect old and new; dismantled bricks were reused in the garden as thermal masses—absorbing heat by day, releasing it by night.

As visitor and resident flows change throughout the year, the project supports varied occupancy modes, household configurations, and rhythms of use. In doing so, it reactivates a forgotten typology—transforming it from a relic of industrial austerity into a model for inclusive, future-oriented rural life.

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 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.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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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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Empty hall, machines gone, workers disappeared… forgotten by time, fortunes of dozens mills in Glarus, ghosts of the grandiose industrialisation, despite the collective fame of Glarus industry.

The labourers, who had devoted their whole lives in the mills, have faded out the line of sight of people, so as their single stories. Today, the columns has become the only witness of the past everyday life, with the names of the silent nobodies, which exposes their unspoken wishes to be remembered. There are thousands of concealed individual ordinary stories to be discovered under the collective glorious one.

The house of memory, a place, where the echos of old industry are going to be collected, while the new creative chapters are in process. A living chronicle of the local industrial past, composed of an archive filled by locals, as well as a research centre and atelier for scholars, artists, designers and entrepreneurs form outside. It is an exhibition and celebration space for all, a new story to be continued by thousands of individual participations. 

The house of memory is a bridge from the past to the future, honouring the industrial legacy of Glarus while inspiring innovation and creativity. We remember, we honour, we reimagine. Through remembering the past, we shape an open future.

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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.

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This proposal explores an alternative type of tenure that works collectively with tenants and wildlife coexisting, equally participating in the maintenance of the soil we cultivate, the air we breath, biodiversity and the beauty of our walks.

This project will focus on one of the buildings Im Strähler and how its infrastructures and the landscape along the Triemlifussweg are adapted and renovated to suit this new form of housing.

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Book
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Network = Networth
PDF  97 MB

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Glattpark
PDF  97 MB