Roger Diener, Jacques Herzog, Marcel Meili, Pierre de Meuron, Christian Schmid
2024
The website «Open Access ETH Studio Basel» presents a selection of publications by the ETH Studio Basel as open access. ETH Studio Basel, Contemporary City Institute, was founded in 1999 as an institute of urban research 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 groundbreaking 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 territory of the entire country, tracing urbanisation processes that had 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. Several additional territorial studies on Switzerland elaborated over the years culminated with a call for designing the «unbuilt» in achtung: die Landschaft (2016).
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