May 7, 2024
The ETH Studio Basel Contemporary City Institute / Institut Stadt der Gegenwart, was founded in 1999 at the ETH Zürich Department of Architecture by architects Roger Diener, Jacques Herzog, Marcel Meili, Pierre de Meuron and by urban sociologist and geographer Christian Schmid. Operating over two decades until 2018, the ETH Studio Basel created ground breaking research on urbanisation and territory, tightly linked to the pedagogy of the design research studios.
Switzerland: An Urban Portrait (2006) was ETH Studio Basel’s first major project, motivated by rapid urban change. Echoing Henri Lefebvre’s thesis of the complete urbanisation of society, the project engaged in a comprehensive investigation of the entire Swiss territory, tracing urbanisation processes that have shaped it and identifying potentials emerging in the new conditions. With its conceptualisation of Switzerland beyond the urban-rural divide, the project and the book revolutionised the public discourse and institutional approaches to spatial planning. It also initiated a novel approach to research in architecture based on specific methodologies including ethnographic fieldwork methods and cartographic exploration and analysis. It has been foundational to the development of a territorial approach to urbanisation.
Other influential research trajectories and projects completed include the research on exemplary cities, resulting in the publications The Inevitable Specificity of Cities (2014) and Belgrade. Formal / Informal: A Research on Urban Transformation (2012); and the comparative analysis of extended urbanisation in different world regions published in the book Territory: On the Development of Landscape and City (2016). Several territorial studies on Switzerland elaborated over the years culminated with a call for designing the “unbuilt” in achtung: die Landschaft (2016).
These and other publications by the ETH Studio Basel have now been relaunched as open access on a dedicated website, here. This valuable public archive, which also includes the documentation of design research studios, offers a detailed insight into the research and pedagogy of ETH Studio Basel between 1999 und 2018.
The open access (re)launch was celebrated at an event at ETH Zürich on May 7, with roundtable discussions among collaborators and students, including Roger Diener, Emanuel Christ, Mathias Gunz, Simon Hartmann, Manuel Herz, Jacques Herzog, Vesna Jovanović, Jasmine Kastani, Bart Lootsma, Metaxia Markaki, Pierre de Meuron, Charlotte von Moos, Ligia Nobre, John Palmesino, Shadi Rahbaran, Ann-Sofi Rönnskog, Günther Vogt, and Ying Zhou, among others.
The participants were welcomed by Silke Langenberg, Director of Research at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zürich. The event was moderated by Christian Schmid and Milica Topalović. A video documentation of the event will also be made available on the website.
