The HIL building project will serve research and teaching purposes over a period of three years. It aims to develop new approaches to planning, construction, and use, by leveraging interdisciplinary collaboration between ETH professors and their students and researchers, as well as with specialist departments at ETH and partners from the construction industry.
As part of a teaching project, the HIL's point cloud becomes a creative design medium, generating 350 speculative visions of the future transformation of the existing building.
Myco-Ceiling showcases the creation of lightweight bio-composites from fungal mycelium and wood waste. These panels can then be used as acoustically effective ceiling components in sustainable interior construction projects.
The elective course offered by the BUK department examines paper as a construction material and demonstrates its potential for flexible, resource-efficient and reversible interior structures.
With Hollow-Core 3D Printing (HC3DP), translucent, lightweight, and insulating elements made from recycled polymers can be produced. These components open up new structural, energy-related, and aesthetic possibilities for architectural applications.
This project forms part of the 'Praktikum Umweltbeobachtung' course for second-semester Bachelor of Environmental Engineering students. The aim is to take thermal transmittance measurements (U-values) of the HIL façade.
To gain experience for a future Design Research Lab, room C45 in the Living Lab HIL will be temporarily converted into a workshop. The insights gained will be directly incorporated into the future lab.
The Hönggerberg campus is being developed into a connected, climate-resilient and vibrant place for learning and research – supported by innovative water management, new habitats and high-quality open spaces.
Using the HIL building as a case study, students explore how comfort, climate, and energy consumption interact, and develop alternative solutions for the buildings of tomorrow.
The component catalogue records the building components of the HIL in digital form and classifies them in terms of material and architectural history. In this way, it creates a lasting foundation for the sustainable further development of the building stock.
The project office of the Living Lab HIL creates a space that can be used openly — and by exposing the ceiling and floor, it makes the building’s structural framework visible as part of the experiment.
Three D-ARCH students examine in their semester project how the façade of the HIL building can be preserved and sustainably further developed instead of being replaced.
A systematic assessment of the requirements and expectations of HIL users serves as the empirical basis for the future transformation of the building.
During the Spring Semester of 2026, all architecture students will address the shared context of the HIL in their Master's theses, selecting one of fourteen topics formulated by individual design chairs from their own perspectives.
This input project uses the HIL E60–E73 area to examine how modern and flexible spaces can be realized within the existing HIL structure, in order to fit the various needs of the contemporary architecture school.
In spring 2026, students of the MAS ETH DFAB will develop a wooden roof structure as a prototype for the future extension of the HIL building.
The thesis examines renovation strategies for the HIL building with regard to ETH Zurich's net zero targets. It shows that replacing just four components would significantly reduce emissions.
At the beginning of the 2025 fall semester, 700 architecture students spent a day drawing the HIL building. The resulting works mark the start of an internal departmental debate about the future of the HIL.
The project uses components that become available during the renovation to create a modular furniture system for the HIL. This is digitally planned, circularly designed and implemented as objects that contribute to a sense of place and identity.
The Digital Structural Twin is being used to develop a digital interface between the architectural and structural models. This interface can be used to perform static analyses of different variants (e.g. for the extension of the HIL) very quickly and in a workflow-based manner.
