Architecture School

The HIL was never conceived as a school of architecture: when ETH moved its students out of the city centre in the 1970s, it produced a building that reveals little of the school’s ambitions. In contrast to visionary precedents such as FAU by Vilanova Artigas or Gund Hall by John Andrews, HIL stands for an accidental, labyrinthine provisional structure that today convinces neither spatially nor atmospherically.

The diploma semester explores how HIL can become a viable, welcoming, and sustainable base for the department. As expansion offers little improvement, the focus lies on concentrating and reorganising what already exists: brighter, clearer, more flexible. In parallel, decentralised learning environments such as Anna Halprin’s Dance Deck or Gramsci Monument by Thomas Hirschhorn are analysed, demonstrating how learning can function as open, mobile, and context-responsive. From this interplay between centre and periphery emerges the vision of an architecture school for the 21st century – both grounded and expansive.

In collaboration with Newrope, “rooms of entanglement” reconfigure the relationships between content, processes, and spaces. The preparation phase includes the study of alternative learning environments, glossaries of learning, and an atlas of HIL alongside potential external learning cells. In the design phase, students develop projects that translate new programmes and modes of learning into spatial form.