The Pleasure in Small Things
Introduction 16 September 2025, 10 am
Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, Agnès Varda 2000
Cro-Magnons painting imaginary worlds in Ardeche caves, Elizabeth I displaced 400 years into the future to witness the chaos wrought by her class, bourgeois Parisians cooking their meals with the waste from restaurants, by choice. Scenarios from three films portraying societies removed from the mainstream and hinting at futures less dominated by consumption and fractured social contracts. Agnès Varda’s gleaners and their agriculture alternatives, Werner Herzog’s psychedelic cave reveries, Derek Jarman’s jubilee-year punk anarchy, describe cultures that are admittedly peripheral to our society and everyday consciousness, their spirit, however, lies just beneath the surface, waiting for circumstances and willing accomplices to pull them up into the world.
This semester we will engage with social alternatives to imagine futures for three underused sites from the 60s and 70s. It will be impossible to think strategically and in the long term – where in any case well-intended plans are often overtaken by shifting reality – so we will work precisely and in detail, attending to material and form in a search for the pleasure in small things. Our ambition is to instil social and formal complexity in each part of the project and at every stage, believing that architecture, like the worlds described in the films of Jarman, Varda and Herzog, has a role to play in emancipating us from simply being consumers.
The semester will be arranged as a continuous process where research is seamless with design, where individual work is also groupwork, where the full scale comes directly from ground plans. Our journey will be accompanied by friends and guests who will become part of the journey. We hope you will join us.
Introduction: 16 September 2025, 10:00 am, ONA E30
Construction and writing as integrated disciplines are included in this course.
HS 2025, ETH Zürich, Studio Caruso
Emilie Appercé, Lucia Bernini, Tibor Bielicky, Adam Caruso, Florian Kilian Jaritz