Maintenance and repair ON SITE

Implementation of the Project/Course

The project builds on a threefold structure (elective, seminar week, design studio) to balance active teaching with passive support and peer-to-peer-exchange to enhance self-guided learning. The elective course teaches basic understanding of preservation principles and skills in traditional crafts. During the seminar week, students apply this knowledge in a controlled real-world setting. In the design studio, students work in groups to develop an architectural project, receiving weekly feedback from professors, assistants and practicing architects.

The direct engagement with the built heritage on-site during the seminar week is a pivotal moment in the semester. Students encounter real-world constraints such as budget limitations, client interests, time pressure, skill requirements, tool and material availability as well as questions of preservation. This presents a rare opportunity in the curriculum of architecture at ETH Zurich.

Students collaborate in shared learning spaces and across different groups to coordinate tasks and responsibilities. This fosters exchange and requires a high level of self-reflection. The teaching team supports students across all three formats—through lectures, workshops, desk critiques, and on-site collaboration—building trust and reinforcing shared values of responsibility and cooperation. During the seminar week, the collaboration between students, teaching team, and experts promotes an open dialogue, mutual respect, and reciprocal learning across all levels.

The project demonstrated that students take responsibility for the site and their tasks, acting with care, aware of the cultural and material value of the existing structures. Students identify strongly with their projects, gather information independently, document their work, and track their learning progress autonomously. They are committed to completing their respective projects and take pride in the results. Students have also shown growing social responsibility and cohesion, highlighted by including an external engineering student.

The assessment strategy is tailored to the learning objectives of each course format. At the end of the semester, the students present their repair projects from the seminar week, demonstrating their ability to critically communicate and reflect on what they have learned. This critical reflection also forms part of the evaluation in the design studio. Students are assessed on how well they transfer, and scale acquired knowledge to develop alternative design solutions and communicate them with architectural tools such as drawings and models.

The interdisciplinary nature of the project posed challenges in communication, as differing terminologies and methods among participants required extensive coordination. This highlights the importance of continuing projects that bring together people from diverse backgrounds and skill sets to learn from one another.

Motivation, Project Mission, Vision Statement

The teaching of monument and built heritage preservation at architecture schools remains often at theoretical level. Yet, there is clear potential to transfer established preservation methods into architectural education. These methods focus on the main goals of preservation: to retain existing qualities, values, materials, and resources as much as possible, while ensuring that buildings remain habitable and meet today’s needs. This approach is becoming increasingly relevant in the context of climate change, resource scarcity, and the need to care for our built environment. Most importantly, students themselves are calling for these issues to be addressed explicitly in architectural education.

The teaching project was developed to address this need within D-ARCH. It builds on the expertise of the Professorship for Construction Heritage and Preservation, which has taught monument preservation—its theories, methods, and strategies—through hands-on repair of everyday objects in elective courses since 2020. The vision is to equip students with the knowledge, tools and space to develop a long-term career in architecture, focusing on sufficiency, sustainability, authenticity and care. These aspects are becoming increasingly important in architectural practice as the focus shifts from new construction to maintenance and renovation.

Innovative Elements

The project is innovative in both teaching approach and format. It introduces a heritage-based design method: repairing and adapting existing structures rather than starting from tabula rasa— “as much as necessary, as little as possible.” Students gain skills in design, construction, craftsmanship, material knowledge, and preservation. Towards this goal, an integrated and interdisciplinary format combines a design studio in architecture and construction, elective in preservation, and a seminar week. The historic Hotel Schatzalp as a client simulates real-world conditions such as time, budget, and client expectations. A core principle is “learning by doing and failing” which allows students to experiment and adapt—for example, by finding the right colour, material, and technique for painting a ceiling and reapplying the paint until the result is successful. As such, the innovative format and teaching approach are tightly connected.

Effects on Student Learning

The design-build approach promotes active learning, as students implement their repair concepts directly on site and must respond to unexpected challenges on the construction site as a team. Evaluations and feedback show that this method strengthens critical thinking, problem-solving skills, knowledge transfer and teamwork. Practical experience deepens understanding of implementation and the associated methodology and makes learning progress visible not only to the assessing teaching team but also to the students themselves. Immediate barriers challenged participants to exchange skills and knowledge to proceed with the repair projects promoting peer-to-peer learning.

Which Elements of Your Project Would You Recommend to Others?

Key strength of this project is the hands-on, on-site experience during the seminar week, which fosters a deeper appreciation for existing resources and inspires interdisciplinary collaboration. It cultivates understanding of diverse skill sets and encourages initiative in research and active engagement—both planned and informal, during breaks, dinners, and excursions. By integrating this experience with complementary formats—workshops, lectures, and design studios—the project enables meaningful knowledge transfer between expertise areas and critical reflection across scales and conceptual frameworks. This cross-format approach has now been adopted into the new bachelor’s curriculum, reinforcing the value of multidisciplinary and critical reflection in contemporary architectural education

Further Involved Persons

Prof. Tom Emerson, Chair of Design and Construction, ETH Zurich, Cooperation Partner

Amy Perkins,Teaching Assistant, Teaching and Coordination

Lucio Crignola, Teaching Assistant, Teaching

Michelle Geilinger, Teaching Assistant, Teaching

Julius Henkel, Teaching Assistant, Teaching

Alessandro Tellini, Raplab ETH Zurich, Cooperation Partner

Christian Egli, Expert

Liliana Siewczyk, Expert

Henry Welch, Expert

Vera Kaps, Educational Developer D-ARCH, ETH Zurich, Consulting Teaching Innovation

Persons Involved (Not Nominated)

Asel Maria Aguilar Sanchez, Institute for Building Materials, ETH Zurich, Expert

Dr. Timothy Wangler, Institute for Building Materials, ETH Zurich, Expert

Prof Dr Andreas Schwarting, Academic Guest, ETH Zürich, Expert

Anja Beer and David Merz, Visiting Studio Beer/Merz Fall 2024, Cooperation Partner