A New Museum
A New Museum - Studio Review 1
March 27, 2024
Wednesday, March 27th, Studio Review, ETH Zürich, ONA E30, 10:00 – 17:00
Guest: Julia Born
A New Museum
Introduction 20 February 2024, 10am
Do we need new museums? Instead of conveying narratives of power and of how things have always been, new museums could be places of exchange, where the old and the new are present and where different voices are invited to contribute to continuing stories about art and society.
The Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv was established in 1906, and the breadth and diversity of its collections reflects something of the anti-authoritarian origins of Swiss society. The country’s position at the crossroads of Europe means that ‘being Swiss’ is always a dynamic and changing condition. Because it engages with every part of Swiss society the archive transcends many of the biases and power structures that lie at the core of more conventional museum collections.
This semester we will design a new kind of museum that brings material from the Sozialarchiv into direct contact with the people of Switzerland. At present, it is possible to visit the archive or access its collections online. We propose that a physical museum would be able to release the archive’s content and programmes out into the spaces of the city whose rich stories it tells. The museum could disrupt and rethink the relationship between institutions and their public, bringing ideas of the civic to street level which has been left to retail at the service of consumption for too long. A new open architecture could enable the museum to become a portal through which new stories told by the residents of the city can be collected, so that the archive and its public become even more engaged in ongoing cycles of discussion and social production.
Seth Siegelaub, Group Material, and Theaster Gates, collectors, curators and artists active from the 1960s to the present, have made collections and exhibitions that challenge content, display, and ideas of audience. Learning from both the intellectual and the spatial structures of their exhibitions – we will design ways to show and interpret specific parts of the Sozialarchiv collections. Attending to the exhibition architecture, the lighting and environmental conditions, the thresholds to the surrounding city, these designs will become the core ideas for new museums on three central sites in Zurich.
Introduction: 20 February 2024, 10:00 am, Entrance Landesmuseum, 8001 Zürich
Construction and writing as integrated disciplines are included in this course
FS 2024, ETH Zürich, Studio Caruso
Emilie Appercé, Lucia Bernini, Tibor Bielicky, Adam Caruso, Claudio Schneider
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Diploma FS 2024
When content becomes form
Museums have begun to acknowledge that they are not neutral and that their internal structures and displays reproduce power. They also recognise that they might possess too many objects and that their collections are often of questionable origin. We cannot simply shut museums down, because public institutions are the repositories of shared memories and ideas and are at the core of any idea of a sustainable society. If museums are in crisis, how can their relationships with the societies that they are a part of become more productive and what role can architecture play in this process. This semester we will speculate about new museums and the architecture that could support them.
We will start by looking at small collections that comprise art, social documentation, and other archival material. With the help of people who run and use museums and with reference to contemporary discourses on institutional critique, we will engage with this material to find the stories and deeper relationships that exist between these artefacts and the societies from which they emerge, complex networks that are spatial as well as social. The research will be developed into ideas for the arrangement and the interpretation of collections in the production of catalogues and exhibitions, work that communicates the meanings and material qualities of these collections in vivid ways to more diverse audiences.
The main design phase will expand these ideas so that the collections become a core around which other exhibitions, programmes, and ideas of the civic are developed into new ideas for the architecture of museums. Sited within disused industrial, retail and institutional spaces in Zurich it is intended that these experiments could find their way back through the doors of the city’s existing museums and archives.
Diploma, FS 2024, ETH Zürich
Chair Caruso
Emilie Appercé, Adam Caruso, Claudio Schneider
gta exhibitions
Fredi Fischli, Niels Olsen
Redesigning Museums
Redesigning Museums - Final Review
December 19 / 20, 2023
Tuesday, December 19th and Wednesday, December 20th, Final Reviews
09:00, ETH Zürich, ONA E30
Guests: Debasish Borah, Ann Demeester, Gianni Jetzer, Solange Mbanefo, Joanna Mytkowska
Redesigning Museums - Studio Review 2
November 21 / 22, 2023
Tuesday, November 21st and Wednesday, November 22nd, Studio Review, ETH Zürich, ONA E30, 09:00 – 19:05
Guests: Thomas Demand, Angelika Hinterbrandner
Redesigning Museums - Studio Review 1
October 18, 2023
Wednesday, October 18th, Studio Review, ETH Zürich, ONA E30, 09:30 – 17:00
Guest: Sabine von Fischer
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
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Reframe, Rearrange, Repeat
Inspired by the trans material metamorphoses and the question: Double the building or building the double? The focus of my project shifted from the building I was first looking at to its less noticeable neighbour.
How can one become the double of the other? To achieve the transformation, the building is wrapped in a new façade that creates a new layer in front. The old walls are still perceptible in the interior as a fragment of the building’s former self, dividing the private parts from the communal spaces of the flats. The private rooms stay inside, in the old chore of the building, while the communal spaces are located in the new layer. Through this so generated extension and enlargement, a higher density can be achieved as the number of flats per floor are doubled and the quality of the space is enhanced. Through the extension the two buildings, before visually divided by the staircase, come to touch each other and the former staircase windows are incorporated in the communal spaces of the flat.
The building, now transformed, is read as the double of its neighbour without becoming it’s exact copy. The height, the grid’s proportions and the angle of the façade are slightly different as well as the façade construction. The concrete of one is translated in the wood construction of the other. Trough the silver painting of the wood the two different materials are perceived as the same from afar and only at a closer look the different textures are reviled. While the outside of the building tries to mimic the concrete façade construction of its neighbour, the wooden construction is explicitly shown in the interior, creating a contrast between the old and the new.
Re form
Time
In a world where time is inevitably associated with money, places to escape are a rarity. Consumption shapes our behavior patterns and corrupts our inner path to a liberated life or a life after liberated time, where time does not mean money and where time is not connected to any productivity. The city‘s shape is one big display of our economic system, where human beings are degraded to replaceable parts of this unconceivable machine.
There is a lack of places which do not dictate where one can be and where one does not have to conform to a predetermined status quo and subordinate oneself to the productivity of the system.
The goal of a church is for an individual to be able to escape from everyday life and relate to their inners selves through ritual and meditation. A spiritual space can only be experienced when it stands in contrast to everyday life. Accordingly, a church must dissociate itself from the productivity and pressures of society.
By crossing Bahnhofstrasse, one is fully exposed to capitalism. With each step away from Bahnhofstrasse and moving closer to Niederdorf, one also enters a time capsule. Time is constantly decelerating. The tower of St. Peter’s Church protrudes behind the old town houses and can be seen from afar, however the path does no lead there directly.
The St. Peterhofstatt is an oasis. One feels relieved from the stress of everyday life. People come to the square to have lunch, to find a quiet minute or to relax. Like a black hole in the consumer-driven world, it is quiet and deserted. A rarity in the otherwise pulsing world. The big stairs act as a platform, the square as a promise for interaction between people.
To gain spiritual experience, one must always gain a sensual experience first. This is achieved through crossing the square and entering the church. The church forms a continuous space with the forecourt. The atmosphere of an oasis that can be felt in the square is transmitted to the church itself. It is a place detached from time and capitalistic pressure. A place for the community, where one can pray, work and live, where rituals happen, where the connection between the past and the future is accomplished. The church itself becomes a forecourt, the forecourt becomes the church. A continuous space of possibility is created that functions as an oasis. An oasis for a liberated time, for possibilities, for spirituality and for a space without regulations and without a program. An oasis for all.
Cloister
The cloister on the forecourt of St. Peter’s Church manifests itself as a new gateway and meeting point for the church and the square by structuring it. The atrium acts as a center for the forecourt. The slope of the roof collects rain water and directs it through a gutter into the fountain. One is constantly confronted with the calming sound of falling water.
Sanctuary
The old doors of the church are removed so that the church space can be read as one continuous space with the forecourt, now also functioning as a roof. A new structure is created inside the church that provides a new space for prayer. As the congregation of active churchgoers dwindles, the size is adjusted accordingly. The form is defined by the shape of the prior Romanesque church. This creates an asymmetry with the nave. The prayer room aligns on one side to the old church tower and interrupts the symmetry of the nave, creating a direct connection between the entrance of the church and the room. The prayer room reads like a canopy. It protects the sanctuary of the church and its congregation. The filigree steel structure is covered by a fabric roof. The windows on all sides are equipped with a motor, which allows one to raise the windows to enlarge the prayer room in case of a bigger event. By separating the prayer room, the rest of the church can be read as one space.
Cell
In the back of the church, cells open up to further reduce the size of the large church space. The cells allow one to find isolation. Through the placement of the walls and the pews set against them, each niche takes on a private character and gives new meaning to the existing choir stalls. One comes to terms with oneself and defines one’s own program. The area is lit sparsely compelling visitors to focus more on their other senses.
Herb garden
The rear St. Peterhofstatt opens up to nature in a new way. Parts of the head pavement are removed and re-stacked as benches. The areas without head paving are covered with plants, which support the sensory experience one can have in this place. Specific local wildflowers and herbs are chosen that are visually stimulating and secondly attend to the sense of smell.
Even if the place is visited daily, it is still detached from everyday life. The place itself creates a “purposeful uselessness” and thus withdraws from the ordinary state of the city. One is confronted with one’s senses at every moment, which leads to a confrontation with oneself. The place offers a chance in a central and prominent location to create spaces that relate to the human being and do not have to make capitalistic profit.
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
Interim, forever
In unmittelbarer Umgebung des Hotels Marriott entwichkeln sich in den 70er, 80er und 90er Jahren um und auf dem Platzspitz verschiedene Szenen. Züri brännt 1980. Das Marriott ist Teil des gescheiterten Infrastrukturprojekts Ypsilon und dem Milchbucktunnel. Welten treffen hier aufeinander, voneinander entkoppelt. Die Strategie des temporären Besetzens und Nutzens von Freiräumen in der Stadt wurde in der Jugendbewegung der 80er Jahren oft genutzt. Mit leichten Interventionen wird an unbeachteten Orten Unerwartetes geschaffen. Sie spielen sich in unterschiedlichen zeitlichen und räumlichen Grössenordnungen ab.
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
Dancing together apart re-evaluates the accessibility to food in cities, including the socio-cultural aspect around food rituals and spaces in communities. A proposition in three acts articulates different scales on the site of Engrosmarkt, from events to architectural interventions, as an ongoing research challenging the publicness of the industrial site.
The interventions gradually disrupt, alter, and modify some existing part of the site while using and misusing what is already built. The six physical infiltrations simultaneously happen with the emergence of a community life next to the sellers and truck drivers. Programs implicating each point of the city food chain arise alongside the market. Engrosmarkt becomes a laboratory working together but still apart with the existing flows.
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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