Archive exhibitions

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)

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.

Blog post on ETHeritage (German)

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.