The aluminium façade of the ETH building HIL on the Hönggerberg campus has embodied the technological progress of its time for nearly fifty years: precisely manufactured, prefabricated, and designed to be almost maintenance-free. Today, it is officially classified as “at the end of its life cycle” — yet its materials remain intact. The façade has not failed; it has aged.
The semester project by David Albrechtsson, Kristina Meier, and Hanna Sevcik, developed in the Autumn Semester 2025 in Studio Emerson, takes this as its starting point. Instead of demolition and replacement, the students pursue an approach that combines preservation, further development, and sustainability. Through careful analysis, targeted repairs, re-anodisation, renewed joints, and improved building-physics performance, the existing façade will be upgraded to meet contemporary requirements.
This project understands maintenance not as a nostalgic gesture, but as intelligent use of resources and as a contemporary architectural strategy. The existing building is regarded as a valuable foundation that gains depth and meaning through responsible interventions.
In this way, the building does not persist as a relic of the 1970s, but continues to evolve as a living system — with low resource consumption, a strengthened identity, and a strong ecological impact.
