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Architectural Design V-IX: The Importance of Being Ernst (T.Emerson)
Last Updated: 2026-02-05 16:39:00
Abstract
Atelier Gisel is seeking applications from twenty-four early career architects to resume professional and creative activities of one of Zurich the most important architectural practices. Applicants should demonstrate an interest in documenting, re-imaging and extending the practice’s seminal architectural oeuvre built between the 1940’s and the 1990’s.
Objective
Use drawing, photography and model-making to grasp and communicate your stance towards the built and natural surroundings. Work with archival material and your documentation of the existing to develop a design project. Develop a critical stance towards material culture, ecology and biodiversity, construction, densification and the transformation within the existing built and natural fabric. Develop and refine skills in making, thinking through one’s hands. Learn how to discuss and develop group projects, in groups of two and bigger.
Content
Atelier Gisel is seeking applications from twenty-four early career architects to resume professional and creative activities of one of Zurich the most important architectural practices. Applicants should demonstrate an interest in documenting, re-imaging and extending the practice’s seminal architectural oeuvre built between the 1940’s and the 1990’s. Atelier Gisel is a three-storey building near Klusplatz, designed in 1974 for and by the office of Ernst Gisel. Following the closure of the office after six decades of professional practice, Gisel gifted the atelier, alongside his archive, to ETH on condition it remains a place where architecture is practised. In many ways, Gisel’s former office set the gold standard for the architectural and building culture of Zurich in the second half of the twentieth century. We shall use our direct experience of the studio and the archive as a starting point for translations of past exemplars into contemporary questions. What material strategies would one develop to achieve the same refinement, the same genus loci but in the era of climate emergency? The task may seem straight forward and modest at first, but it will require a rigorous and radical imagination to develop a contemporary architecture that is both specific and could become the standard for which architecture aspire. Low carbon, accessible, playful, sculptural, expressive or discreet; they can all work as long as you remember the importance of being Ernst.
Resources
Literature
It would be wrong to describe suburban architecture in Zurich as anonymous and rarely can it be described as genius. Many architects have worked with care and dedication in designing houses for their clients. Yet this pioneering book by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy published in 1957 titled, Native genius in anonymous architecture can provide a mirror in which to reflect objectively on the qualities of an architecture, which while not anonymous, does not have a voice in academic architecture. Written nearly a decade before Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects (1964), Moholy-Nagy seeks to identify the architectural qualities intrinsic to North American building traditions and design. She writes about what she sees; her gaze is forensic about construction and materials, form and climate.. Her attention to architecture in relation to climate and user anticipates the preoccupations of post-oil crisis environmentalism, solar houses and the contemporary search for a sustainable and regenerative architecture today. Buildings are transmitters of life is the opening statement. And while the life of the people who design, build and use the buildings under examination is front and centre, the book is structured from the outside long before the Anthropocene was named, demanding new atmospheric taxonomies. Site and Climate leads to Form and Function, Material and Skills and A Sense of Quality enigmatically illustrated by the roof, corner, base and access (doors to you and me). Moholy-Nagy’s chapters are not only useful in offering a way to see and understand architecture, it maintains a critical bite into a vernacular too often romanticised by Modernism. She does not spare the ‘bunglers who studded the land with eyesores’. She is attentive to deep cultural meaning, praising histories that naturally embody climate, use and change while wary of the ‘tyranny of tradition’. We can use NGIAA to look differently at the single-family house. To see it as an environment of material events embodying social value. To see it as a place of invention and tradition, often wasteful but full of potential. Above all Moholy-Nagy draws narrative from climate to door detail that speaks to the most pressing issues of today and tomorrow. More specific literature will be discussed and provided upon request.
Learning Materials (Links)
- Main link
- Information
General Information
- Language
- English
- Levels
- BSC
- Frequency
- Semesterly recurring
Examination
- Type
- graded semester performance
Course Components
| Type | Title | Time & Place | Hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| exercise |
Architectural Design V-IX: The Importance of Being Ernst (T.Emerson)
Permission from lecturers required for all students.
No course 19/20.3.2024 (seminar week)
|
|
16 h weekly |