The classrooms of yesterday are dead. Even if we still see them everywhere, even if they are the only thing we know how to build. The transformation of the HIL Building opens a moment of opportunity. We want to make productive use of this transition: by swarming out into the city, a test ground for new educational practices opens up. An architecture school grounded in a real context.
Our mission is built around a new term of one-to-one. To learn and teach through the physical, through the body and its knowledge. To work with real-life construction, to draw lessons, to go back to drawing. Education is never neutral, and as a public institution, ETH must take responsibility for the position it holds within the city.’
Such a situation is found at the border between Bernerstrasse Nord and Bändlistrasse, on the north side of the rail tracks in Altstetten. A collaged conglomerate of diverse buildings: two twin storage structures from the early 1960s, a garage that grew over time, and some neglected residential buildings. This conglomerate is about to change. With the new BZO revision of 2026, the entire strip is being rezoned, putting its existing dynamics in a vulnerable position. The risk is that the area transforms into a monofunctional Schlafquartier, which then needs to be artificially activated.
Yet the neighborhood has energy. The Gemeinschaftszentrum, the Quartierverein Grünau, the project Drehscheibe are proof that inhabitants want a voice, pushing for self-determination, spatially and politically.
The two twin buildings are not particularly beautiful, but they are very smart. Their concrete pillar structure has allowed them to adapt over time, hosting today a remarkably diverse range of uses: wood workshops, young architecture offices, artist studios, a barbershop, an improvised gallery, and more, all around a shared working courtyard.
The project works in two phases. First, three new timber buildings are added along the motorway, consolidating the additional volume permitted by the new BZO across all four parcels. The two storage buildings are left almost entirely untouched — they work as they are. Only in one corner, facing the neighborhood, the floor is lowered to ground level to create a forum space. The department occupies these new spaces: studios, a large workshop, lecture halls. Parts of the structure are intentionally left rough, a 1:1 testground where students can still try things out, draw conclusions, and learn directly from built space.
After roughly ten years, the department's presence shrinks. Three studios remain, focused on construction and urban research, observing the ongoing consequences of the new BZO on the neighborhood. The street-facing forum space, with its open facade, is handed over to the Gemeinschaftszentrum. The upper floors become flexible strips, configurable as workshops, housing, or anything in between. Spaces to test a project without buying all the infrastructure, spaces that can soften the transition from architecture school to practice.