Flying Structures
The studio explores temporary forms of construction as an alternative to HIL: how can flying, mobile, and open structures create the spatial conditions that architectural education truly requires?
The ten-year renovation of HIL will gradually enclose, wrap, and standardise the building. At the same time, this process reveals a fundamental weakness: HIL was never conceived as a place for architectural learning. Its deep, low, and enclosed spaces stand in contrast to the spatial needs of a pedagogy grounded in physical experience, materials, noise, friction, and direct exchange. Architecture does not emerge in sealed, sterile interiors, but through engagement with the city, atmosphere, and the unexpected.
Against this backdrop, the studio turns to the tradition of temporary school buildings in Zurich—so-called flying structures. These mobile, easily assembled and dismantled constructions offer qualities that HIL lacks: flexible approvals, minimal foundations, generous heights, non-standardised volumes, and open spatial envelopes that accommodate noise and experimentation. They enable forms of use aligned with the processual nature of architectural production: building, testing, prototyping, and collective invention in real time.
The studio understands temporary architecture not as a provisional solution, but as a spatial intelligence in its own right. The department’s most successful learning environments—from the Globus Provisorium to the white drawing halls—have always been such interim architectures: designed for short-term use, yet extended because they worked. By developing flying structures as a serious spatial option, the studio proposes a countermodel to the permanently enclosed HIL: an open, experimental, and adaptable learning environment that redefines the foundations of architectural education.