Archive exhibitions
17 April to 31 July 2024
How can agriculture and architecture work together in a post-fossil fuel construction industry? How might cultivating the use of plants for construction improve outcomes for people, plants and animals across our bioregion?
In the autumn of 2023 London-based architecture practice Material Cultures led a guest design studio at the ETH Zurich entitled Planting Buildings: Housing the Ecoregion. Through researching cultivated plants across various European ecoregions, the studio explored the design of housing systems that bridge between the disciplines of conservation, cultivation and construction.
The work of the students is at the centre of this exhibition: eight 1:1 scale mock-ups that bring together the studio's research, material experiments and experimental construction details representing fragments of buildings that draw from the landscape.
11 May to 14 July 2023
As the last publication of the professorship Annette Spiro at the ETH Zurich, a handbook for the planning of plastered surfaces in interior spaces has been produced. In addition to the historical development and traditional application of the building material, material properties and contemporary design options are discussed on the basis of numerous project examples. The volume aims to raise awareness of the necessary measures in the planning process and the surprising variety of craft possibilities.
The exhibition at the ETH Materials Hub presents the types of interior plaster presented in the book, high-quality plaster samples according to traditional methods of making, plaster samples of concrete contemporary architectural projects, as well as works by students created in the context of a plaster workshop.
03 April to 02 May 2023
It is time to go beyond sustainability. Alternative solutions out of local resources such as earth, bio-based and reused materials are emerging all over the world and are triggering regenerative outputs, thanks to their capacity to contribute to the restoration and improvement of the surrounding natural and social environment. However, they are not widespread in the construction sector due to lack of information on the side of decision makers and lack of competence on the side of practitioners.
The Certificate of Advanced Study in Regenerative Materials – Essentials, an international ETH training programme launched by the Chair of Sustainable Construction of the ETH Zurich, aims to tackle this problem. It offers knowledge and skills to question our conventional construction techniques and to promote regenerative materials from resource extraction to construction site, operation and end of life of the building materials. It promotes a territorial approach from the preliminary phase of the construction process.
The SS 2023 programme is divided into five practice-oriented modules. The results of the module 3 Bio-based construction are currently on display in the ETH Materials Hub until 2nd of May 2023.
17 November 2022 to 24 February 2023
Crooked growth, poor weather resistance and the difficult bonding properties of hardwood are the reasons why load-bearing components have been made mainly of softwood since the 19th century. Native hardwood species such as beech, oak, ash and chestnut, by contrast, are mainly used for furniture and interior furnishings. However, old buildings prove that hardwood can certainly be used in load-bearing constructions, because it has many advantages: due to its greater strength, more slender constructions can be realised, and the boundaries between the load-bearing construction and the interior finish can be rendered more fluid.
As the supply of hardwood resources in Central Europe is steadily increasing as a result of climate change and a reorientation of forest management, research and development work in this area has been expanded over the last few years and hardwood is becoming increasingly important in the construction sector.
The exhibition shows various innovative hardwood materials that are already available on the market, pioneering results from wood research as well as exemplary architectural projects in which hardwood is used instead of softwood.
14 October to 11 November 2022
The BIPV (Building Integrated Photovoltaics) Workshop, organized by the Chair of Architecture and Building Systems, at ETH Zurich, gathers students from the fields of architecture and engineering to design and develop new energy producing façade elements.
Starting with basic solar materials, PV module components are no longer considered as ready-made engineered products, but as design materials to work with. The students have the opportunity to freely assemble, glue, cut, laminate, solder, create and play with these materials, while getting a unique hands-on experience.
During the one-week workshop the emphasis is put on the symbiosis between design, and technical aspects, such as energy generation and transparency. The students’ iterative thinking process ranges from the PV module’s scale of approximately 20cm x 35cm to the actual building’s façade integration. Reflecting on design, construction, integration and electricity production simultaneously is a fundamental aspect to achieve a successful integration. A total of 8 works will be exhibited, each of which was conceived by two students during the one-week workshop.
03 May to 05 July 2022
Concrete is currently the most widely used building material worldwide. At the same time, the production of the binding agent cement causes a considerable proportion of global CO2 emissions. In the exhibition designed at the external page ZHAW in Winterthur, concrete as a building material is broken down into its individual components, and manufacturing processes and variants are explained. The latest research is also presented, such as CO2-sequestered recycled concrete, in which the aggregate is enriched with CO2, and LC3 cement, in which half of the climate-damaging cement is substituted by limestone and calcined clay. Whether these developments can give concrete a future as a climate-friendly building material is a crucial question to which there is no conclusive answer yet.
10 May to 21 June 2019
Extended to 19 July 2019
Wood joints reflect the different building cultures in timber construction. They are shaped by climate and material, but also by aesthetic values. While the traditional timber construction of Central and Southern Europe is dominated by half-timbered buildings, in Scandinavia block constructions from horizontal trunks are characteristic. In China and Japan, a skeleton construction method was established that gets away without stiffening walls and withstands typhoons and earthquakes particularly well.
The purely wooden joints have experienced a renaissance in recent years, partly due to changes in fire protection regulations and computer-aided manufacturing techniques.
In the exhibition you can see traditional, pure wood joints from Europe and the Anglo-Saxon area as well as from China and Japan. It also shows how wood joints are used in current and future construction projects.
Download Flyer of the exhibition (German only) (PDF, 328 KB)
11 December 2018 to 04 February 2019
There are currently over seventy active stone quarries in Switzerland in which around fifty different types of stone are extracted. In the past two years, all these types of stone have been acquired as samples in various handcrafted and modern surface finishing processes for the material collection and included in the database external page www.materialarchiv.ch. The exhibition shows a selection of these Swiss stone samples and puts them into an architectural context.
01 July to 01 October 2017
Since antiquity, marble has stood for power and elevated status. Based on the Feliciani Collection, a repository of ancient Roman coloured marbles in possession of ETH Zurich, the latest story on Explora traces how marble and other decorative types of stone were deployed in different architectural epochs. In a series of video interviews, professors and academics from ETH Zurich provide commentaries on the Feliciani Collection as well as on coloured marbles in the context of ancient, modern and contemporary architecture.
On the occasion of the go live of the article 'marbe architecture power. A construction material with a history' on ETH Library's storytelling platform Explora, samples of various decorative stones that are still available today and were already partly used in the antiquity are being shown in the Material Collection. Among these are marbles, limestones, serpentinites and gneisses.
