The Regrown Limb – A Situated Architecture School as Community Commitment
As the ETH's HIL Building undergoes transformation, the Department of Architecture seizes the moment: rather than renovating under ongoing operation, the school swarms out into the city — making the urban context itself the classroom.
The project centers on a new understanding of 1:1: learning through the body, through physical construction, through real scale. Architectural knowledge democratized and doors opened, literally and figuratively.
For more than a decade, the Güterbahnhof area next to Hardbrücke in Zurich's Kreis 4 has been subject to erasure. The last remnants of the industrial hall face demolition, while offices along Hohlstrasse are under intense real estate pressure. Within these shifting grounds, the department of architecture moves in — taking responsibility to resist a monofunctionalist development of the area.
Students engage in 1:1 construction, building scenographies for the neighbouring performing arts institution and exhibition space — informing the architectural language of the interventions within the existing.
Taking position pedagogically and architecturally, the project adopts the posture of pushing back: like epimorphosis — an animal's capacity to regrow a severed limb — the two remaining pieces of the originally 400-metre-long Güterbahnhofs-Halle grow back longitudinally.
The composite steel construction with secondary timber structure, found in the existing, is translated into a dry constructive system that touches the ground lightly on pad foundations made from demolition material and a grid of reused rails.
Three new Halle compartments emerge: a Montagehalle — a column-free space spanned by a truss, transformable into a performance venue; a Werkhalle echoing the existing structure but with slightly heavier columns carrying workstation cranes; and an Ausstellungshalle where the column becomes an infrastructural element for both exhibitions and everyday work.
In the repurposed office buildings, further shared uses emerge: a Gemeinschaftszentrum, a wood workshop shared with the neighbourhood, studios, and a discussion and review forum within a thermally and architecturally upgraded roof space.
The architecture school is produced by its context — a community commitment, grounded in a real situation.