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. 

 The logbook ‘Klausenpass: Between two distinct valleys’ was created during the research phase on the topic ‘Switzerland at a Crossroads’ in the Klausenpass region. It focused on the similarities and differ- ences between the Schächental and Glarnertal. With several interviews, we explored the infrastructure in the landscape, living systems and the migration to the centres.

The resulting project ‘The Glarus Alps Battery with Algae Cultivation’ deals with the question of how existing infrastructure systems, vacant buildings and agriculture can be used to create a post-fossil production and at the same time a qualitative place with added value for the local population with just a few tweaks.

The Linth-Limmern pumped storage power plant produces energy using hydropower. The power plant network makes it possible to collect turbid water and pump it back up when the energy price is low in order to generate energy again. In addition to the high-Alpine Muttsee and Limmernsee reservoirs, there are the Tierfehd and Linthal compensating reservoirs in the valley. These are monofunctional con- crete reservoirs, which are fenced in and offer no added value.

After the collapse of the textile industry, the valley is characterised by vacant industrial buildings, which are underused. Due to the vacancy and the location, there is little economic pressure on real estate compared to urban areas. This provides cost-effective space for projects and innovative ideas. Besides the former industrial buildings, the valley is very agricultural. In Switzerland, 270,000 tonnes of animal feed are imported from soya every year. Agroscope is currently researching alternative sources of protein, such as algae. These can be produced on uncultivated land and have a higher protein con- tent per kg. Growth occurs through photosynthesis and CO2 in a closed system.

The project combines a floating algae production facility on the compensation basin built for energy generation with a public swimming pool as an additional function and added value for the local popula- tion. The algae will be processed in the nearby former Bebié wool spinning mill, which will be converted with minor interventions. Both the construction of the bath and the installations in the industrial building are made of unused hardwood.

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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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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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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.

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The environment of a building is under continuous social, economic and technological change. What role does the construction of a building play in the process of these environmental changes? Do new usage requirements inevitably lead to a complete replacement of the building, or can they be converted to make them suitable for the new environment? Can CIBA’s existing welfare building from 1957 fin a changed form even play an innovative, identity-creating role in a newly developed quarter?

Observing the existing has pushed me to choose the new paradigm of a personal comfort-adaptive architecture thanks to which I have created a new art of participatory inhabitation. My project highlights the importance of adaptability and flexibility in design. The doctorands are free to shift, adjust and divide the spaces based on their personal needs through flexible partitions (i.e. layers and walls). In addition, the flexibility of the layers and the controlled / uncontrolled spaces allow the doctorands to regulate the thermal conditions within the entire building.

To a large extent, CIBA’s welfare building built in 1957 is left close to its original state, with small-scale interventions and adaptations. Innovation and research are part of CIBA’s welfare house’s identity – they have always been and will remain. The doctorand’s house aims to be a place where innovation and research can flourish, a doctorand’s house that is perfectly adaptable to the needs of the individual as well as of the community.

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Book Final Submission
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Have you ever wondered what's behind the cover?
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Glattpark
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