ETH Zürich   Studio Adam CarusoETH Zürich  Studio Adam CarusoETH Zürich  Studio A. CarusoETHZ   Studio Caruso

Dwelling is an activity—a dynamic process shaped by the flow of people. Linthal, in the canton of Glarus, once flourished through the textile industry but declined with its disappearance. Amid underused buildings in this quiet town, Kosthaus stands on a broad meadow in the valley.

Originating in the 19th century, the Kosthaus was a pragmatic housing model for industrial workers—marked by rationality, repetition, and minimal material use. Typically built as row houses, they prioritized efficiency over comfort.

This thesis explores the adaptive reuse of a former Kosthaus into a flexible housing model that accommodates short-, mid-, and long-term stays within one architectural framework. It aims to show how rural contexts can offer socially integrated, adaptable alternatives to urban housing—responding to contemporary shifts in labor, mobility, and community.

The Linthal Kosthaus includes four distinct units under one roof. Its original spatial logic—a sequence of compact, interconnected rooms—offers surprising potential. Rather than erasing these historical features, the project reclaims them as assets for reimagined collective living.

A new timber extension adds modular rooms divided by curtains, allowing residents to reconfigure spaces and mediate privacy and shared use. Openings in the original façade connect old and new; dismantled bricks were reused in the garden as thermal masses—absorbing heat by day, releasing it by night.

As visitor and resident flows change throughout the year, the project supports varied occupancy modes, household configurations, and rhythms of use. In doing so, it reactivates a forgotten typology—transforming it from a relic of industrial austerity into a model for inclusive, future-oriented rural life.

 The Klausenpass, where the project is located, is very strongly impacted by the different seasons. Indeed, the road closure due to the winter snow covering of the 1948m asl pass makes the place very different depending on the seasons.

The project then seeks to create two different uses, interweaving the different conditions of the surroundings and answering challenges both in winter and summer. In summer, the main focus is to provide a platform dwelling people high up around the pass, providing cheap manpower for the local farmers working in the nearby alps.

In winter, the project otherwise very close to the road become completely isolated. The people that stayed and worked there during summer can stay in the same building, but in a very different environment. As a counterpart -and retribution- to the work accomplished during summer, guided skitouring outings are organized. This way of being compensated for the summer work allows a more economically accessible way to learn mountain sports.

In a more practical way, the building is dimensioned according the the workforce need of the farmers during the summer season. In winter, the building shifts in hibernation mode: since there is less need of rooms, the groups staying there are smaller. The bottom floor is then covered in snow, and is only used again the next spring.

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The Memories of the House Museum is devoted to the domestic spaces of textile industry related housing in Ennenda, Kanton Glarus. This museum spreads all over the village, like a fabric of spaces, each giving a specific impression of a domestic space.

The main exhibition is located in the former industrial site of the Jenny factory in Ennenda. It is situated on the ground floor of a Hängeturm, a reconstruction of a historical local building typology, specifically created to dry freshly printed fabrics. The exhibition consists of 1:1 reconstructions of 19th century domestic spaces from Ennenda. Copying, relocating and rearranging the rooms allows to compare the conditions of dwelling between different social classes that were all involved in the textile industry. It is an attempt to revise the way the local history has been written and to counterbalance the inequality of documentation and preservation of local buildings and stories. The reconstructions are built in timber, each with one section as a plaster cast of the original space. The exhibition of physical spaces is accompanied by pieces of local oral history in the form of specific stories told over speakers.

The Museum spreads into the village and the interventions at Kirchweg are the most direct extension of the museum programme. The row of houses at Kirchweg is under heritage protection and despite having survived for almost two hundred years, some of the houses have started to decay after losing the uses of the ground floor spaces. Previously some of those spaces were used for commercial functions. The houses had stayed relevant because they had the necessary room for adaptation: physically in the form of extensions on the northern side, legally in the form the law. Today this adaptation is partly hindered by heritage protection. With my interventions I aim to find a method to adapt three of those ground floor spaces and to restore their former use, whilst providing a programme that is needed by the museum whilst also becoming a cultural and public space for residents of Ennenda.

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The office building at Gartenhofstrasse 17 was built in 1966 by Sigmund Feigel (1921 - 2004). While the adjacent Zweierstrasse is lined by a row of office buildings constructed around the same time, Gartenhofstrasse 17 is slightly set back into the street, reaching into the realm of residential buildings and neo-classicist factory buildings.

Throughout its lifespan the building had been renovated several times. The roof and the party walls on both sides have been isolated, the canopy renewed, and in 2011 the old facade panels were exchanged. The new facade, designed by Rolf Schaffner, led to a drastic decrease in energy consumption. The different construction periods result in a „bricolage des temps“.

Currently three of the building’s six stories are empty due to the relocation of municipal police offices, making the future of Gartenhofstrasse 17 uncertain.

Only few interventions are necessary to fundamentally change the organization of the building. 

On the inside a new form of living takes place where domestic spaces and the workplace fade into each other. From the outside the additions reinterpret the appearance of the building within its urban setting. While keeping the integrity of Schaffner´s facade intact, the side facades are opened with large pivoting windows that create a vis-à-vis to the adjacent neo-classicist buildings. In the courtyard one of the three parking garages has been opened, creating an alley way between the former office building and a new atelier building. On the front side an extension of the canopy allows a glimpse into the hidden world of the backyard. 

The ways in which particular elements, spaces and structures are transformed remind us of the „rococoization“ of gothic churches.  By introducing a new grammar, given things change the way we perceive them. Despite the obvious friction between building periodes and languages there derives a new unity.

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Familiar strangers proposes a scenario that slowly transforms the hotel and its management style, learning from the daily disruptions and misuses. Alterations spread over time are accumulated on top of each other, creating and discovering other uses of the building. After all, embracing change is one of the core values of Marriott.

Like stage sets, hotels and their lobbies catch attention and provide a backdrop for human interactions. Rather than forcing contact between guests, a new model is put into place by letting visible traces of usage: objects are slowly put on display, voluntarily or not, and become screens onto which imaginative stories of lives past and present can be projected. Temporary kinships are created, and the building and its users become familiar strangers. Gradually, the rooms are transformed into something that can be different and the building is reconnected to the city, fulfilling Marriott’s global vision for the hotel to be “Zurich’s inspiring place, where brilliance connects people.”

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Cohabitation

City as one living organism provides habitat for human and non-human being, they influence their abiotic environment and the environment in turn as well influence the biota.

Due to the urbanisation and monoculture soil usage, city becomes a refuge for wild animal. City should co-evolve with its environment, empower the nonhuman actors and define new typology for cohabitation.

Triemlifussweg is characterized as a „Siedlung Biotop“ connected Uetliberg and Cemetery Sihlfeld.

The these is an interdisciplinary research of sysnanthrope species and aim to develop a strategy of cross-species cohabitation.

cohabitation.cargo.site

The task of re-using Ciba triggered two main questions in me: Firstly, what meaning the term re-use could signify and comport and secondly, what constitutes the identity of a place.
The concept of circular economy possesses a high potential regarding the problems and questions of the CIBA areal. It is about thinking the economy in circular processes, i.e. sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, reconditioning, and finally recycling products and materials. The average demolition of ten houses in Switzerland per day and construction waste’s share of four-fifths of the total Swiss waste proves how vital circular thinking is to future architecture.
By designing the component catalogue, we can give the materials used in the Ciba Buildings an identity and therefore seeing them as a resource. However, in addition to recognising the material value, the value of the work needed to produce the component must also be considered. A building component can be looked at as an accumulation of materials, working processes, assembling operations and production design steps.
The goal of the intervention is to turn the Bau610, the former canteen of CIBA, with minimal interventions in an accessible productive space. The main task of the building is the circulation, i.e. the access for city residents and the movement of the building components.
The building components of dismantled structures are delivered, stored, processed, and distributed again. For this purpose the roof and the basement are connected by a crane in the north and a stair tower with a goods lift facing south.
The new structures are „dressed“ by the ever-changing components stored in the building and display the material accumulation and continuous process.
In this project there isn’t a finished designed building but a proposal for a way of thinking about architecture and the built environment. Instead of production- and consumption-oriented architecture we should advocate circular processes in the architecture and the building industry.
To conclude with a quote of Thomas Hirschhorn, a contemporary artist that greatly inspired this design process : “It is not about re-using, it is about working with what is there”.

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