Governance and Administration

The highest body of D-ARCH is the Department Conference. It holds the responsibility for final decisions regarding all aspects of strategy and planning. The Department Conference is composed of all professors and a delegation of staff, assistants, junior faculty and students. It is presided over by the Dean, who is responsible for the strategic development of D-ARCH and carrying out the decisions of the departmental bodies.

The Department Committee, which consists of the heads of the Institutes and the president of the association of Association of Assistants (AAA) as well as the president of the student association (architektura), deals with the strategic issues and provides the Department’s advice to the Executive Board of D-ARCH. The Professors Conference, composed of all full and associate professors as well as adjunct and assistant professors, deals as a group with all matters concerning professorships. The Teaching Commission is presided over by the Director of Studies, who is responsible for the organization and the quality of all aspects of teaching (curriculum design and implementation plus exams). In 2017 the Department established the Parity and Diversity Commission as an advisory body to the Department Conference to promote the equality of opportunities and to foster parity and diversity across the Department. Professors, non-professorial academic staff and students are equally represented, each always by a woman and a man. The PDK has grown out of an initiative driven by the assistants and junior faculty, the Parity Group, which, since 2016, has been organizing the Parity Talks as a way to raise awareness about and discuss issues of gender and diversity at the Department. The PDK has helped drive initiatives touching on all aspects of the Department, from the teaching curriculum to the organization of public events to the recruitment of new professors.

The students and assistants send delegates to the various bodies through the AAA, Association of Assistants at the Department of Architecture, and architektura, the Association of Architecture Students at ETH Zurich. Architektura is a member of the VSETH (ETH Student Association), which represents the interests of students when dealing with the school administration and authoritative bodies. The AAA and architektura together provide the same number of members to the DK as there are professorial members. Same applies to the UK. In comparison to other departments at the ETH, the number of non-professorial academic staff and student representatives at the Department Conference is exceptionally high; this puts both, and especially students, in a position of influence on departmental policies. Like the active participation of students in the Teaching Comission and Department Conference, this position reflects the importance of student involvement at D-ARCH. Students have driven initiatives to raise and address such issues as studio space, the study curriculum and the diploma, organizing detailed and high-quality surveys amongst the student body and developing large-scale initiatives such as the Baubüro. Also thanks to these initiatives, D-ARCH has demonstrated its willingness and ability to engage with internal and external challenges, such as matters of diversity and gender, and the broader definition of the diploma work.

Thanks to the internal reinforcement of our five Institutes, the Department Committee, where the directors of the Institutes meet with the Executive Board of D-ARCH, plays a key role in the development of departmental strategy, especially as a site for dialogue and collaboration among Institutes. At the same time, the Department remains committed to fostering the dialogue among faculty, assistants and students that occurs especially in the Department Committee, the Teaching Commission, and the Parity and Diversity Commission, and to supporting the bottom-up participation of assistants and students in the governance of the Department that is possible there.