Newly appointed professors Débora Mesa Molina, Adrien Comte and Adrien Meuwly aim to strengthen practical education and research activities for students at the Department of Architecture (D-ARCH) at ETH Zurich. The aim is to establish an interdisciplinary culture of ‘designing through making’ – i.e. designing through practical work with materials and constructions. Construction should not be seen as a by-product of design, but as its basis.
As part of the planned renovation of the HIL building, there are plans to set up a Design Research Lab in the current underground car park of the neighboring HIG. This will enable students and researchers to develop, test and refine spatial and structural ideas on a 1:1 scale as physical prototypes.
To gain experience for the planning of this future laboratory, room C45 in the HIL, previously used as a print shop, has been temporarily converted into a workshop as part of the Living Lab HIL initiative (LLHIL). With just a few structural changes – removing walls and carpet and sanding and sealing the existing cement floor – a test environment for experimental work has been created.
This enables the participating professors and their students to test usage scenarios and observe requirements for infrastructure, room organization and work processes. The insights gained are being directly incorporated into a second adaptation of the old printing works and the design of the future Design Research Lab.
