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

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

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

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

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