Re (Reframe, Rearrange, Repeat)
Re (Reframe, Rearrange, Repeat) - Studio Review 1
March 15, 2023
Zentralwäscherei, Zürich
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
Michael Asher, Kunsthalle Bern, 1992, Sherrie Levine, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, 2002
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
Andreas Gursky, Der Rhein II, 1999
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
Crystal Palace, London 1851
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
09:45 Oana Popescu, Titus Studer
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
09:45 Yoann Miéville, Valentin Popescu
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
Kanzlei Areal, Jan Bauer, Max Schubert
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
VM_DR_ACINPA_2022, main staircase, Volkshaus, Chantal Bekkering, Vanessa Magloire
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
Helvetiaplatz, Zürich
Wednesday, October 12th, Studio Review, ETH Zürich, ONA E30, 09:00 – 16:30
Guest: Isabel Seiffert
Re form
What makes a church pretentious? A tall bell tower? An austere, imposing façade? A stubbornly symmetrical interior? A use of elements that try to make it look like a gothic cathedral? A display of large, expensive objects? Maybe it’s above all a feeling of inadequacy. A suburban place of worship in a quiet, modest residential area, if disguised as a cathedral, will undoubtedly appear pretentious. Maybe then it’s a question of the interplay between scale and context.
From afar, what was once a defining element in the silhouette of the city has now become submerged by more imposing figures. It seems that if it were part of the city, and not only part of its local neighbourhood, then it wouldn’t appear so disproportionate. Maybe it should simply stop pretending and actually start being what it wants to be. If it can house 1,400 people, if it can be seen from afar, if it can resonate far away, if it is too much to handle for its local setting, maybe it should stop hiding amidst its quiet sourroundings. Maybe it should start claiming its place in our city.
Maybe what our cities need, and what this building could offer, is a large, open, accessible, free, public space. This is the essence of a church, one could say. Maybe we should try and celebrate emptyness rather than trying to fill it. Consider it as a breathing space, a void for beauty, for society. Maybe this is a way to turn a pretentious, disproportionate, underused church into a place all could use, appreciate and benefit from. By sharing this monument, by celebrating this void, the building’s bad intentions would be corrected, and its good intentions fulfilled.
When the Pauluskirche was built in 1934, it acted as a social centre for the newly-built housing developments, inhabited by people which had come from the countryside or neighbouring countries to work in the booming industry at the time. Nowadays, it could function as a social centre for the ever-growing student population which lacks functional and pleasant spaces to work outside of home or university. Installing a public reading room would better fulfill the possibilities of this building. It could be a calm, almost meditative space, which could still cater for large events if needed. It would be more accessible, turning it into a meeting point between multiple thoroughfares. This could merge the local inhabitants with the students of the Irchel University campus next door, as well as with the general public.
The nave could act as a large, multi-purpose and accessible public interior, used as a reading room most of the time but easily transformable into a auditorium or a concert hall. A curtain, which could be drawn every other Sunday when services happen, could provide a more intimate atmosphere for the fifty churchgoers who regularly attend. On the other side, the parish centre would balance this void by being transformed into a very dense building, equipped with a library, a café, and many small study rooms which could be booked for conferences and so on. Linking these two, the large square would be transformed by adding a loggia to the parish centre, functionning both as an entrance to the study centre, a covered exterior space for the café and a stage for outdoor concerts.
Maybe we should try and celebrate emptyness rather than trying to fill it. Consider it as a breathing space, a void for beauty, for society. Maybe this is a way to turn a pretentious, disproportionate, underused church into a place all could use, appreciate and benefit from. By sharing this monument, by celebrating this void, the building’s bad intentions would be corrected, and its good intentions fulfilled.
Wen Guan
FS 2022 Re form
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
Interim, forever
Caspar Bultmann / Jeremy Waterfield
HS 2021 Interim, forever
Projekt Interim Waldhaus
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.
Making Plans for Living Together
Laura Cereghetti / Marco Busarello
FS 2021 Making Plans for Living Together, Zürich
Making Plans for Living
Marina Medic / Maria Unterlechner
HS 2020 Making Plans for Living, Zürich
Gawu, El Anatsui
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
What is it worth?
Society and the Image
Emilie Sauter / Pauline Sauter
HS 2019 Society and the Image, Zürich
Download Booklet
PDF 16 MB
Public Building
Jasper Buchmann-Ebbert / Sabrina Waibel
FS 2019 Public Building, Zürich
Recueil et parallèle, Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand
Paris, 1799
Hidden Interiors
Julia Messerschmidt / Maximilian Seibold
HS 2018 Hidden Interiors, Zürich
Villa Meyer, Le Corbusier
Paris, 1925
The Ideal City
Livia Notarangelo / Talissa Weder
FS 2018 The Ideal City, Spreitenbach
Highrise City, Ludwig Hilbeseimer
1924
Describing Beauty
Aline Jean
HS 2017 Describing Beauty, Zürich
Olivestone, Joseph Beuys
1984
Structure and Society
Valentin Buchwalder / Philipp Frisch / Sebastian Oswald
FS 2017 Structure and Society, Zürich
Narkomfin, Moisei Ginzburg / Ignaty Milinis
Moskau, 1930
Social Structure
Rebecca Konnertz
HS 2016 Social Structure, Graubünden
History & People
Graubünden
