"Self-empowerment is important to us": The ZAS* association will be running a visiting studio at ETH from the fall
Like the Zurich Working Group for Urban Design from the 1950s, the ZAS* aims to stimulate the urban planning discourse with alternatives – at the Triemli City Hospital or with their "Office for Urban Design" in Zurich.
A group of young people sit around a large table in Atelier Gisel in Zurich. As they do every month, the members of the ZAS* have spent a day discussing and preparing for the fall semester. Most of them graduated from the ETH a few years ago with a degree in architecture. Now they are returning as a visiting studio at the Institute of Design and Architecture (IEA).
The abbreviation ZAS stands for Zürcher Arbeitsgruppe für Städtebau (Zurich Working Group for Urban Design). The name and the idea of the group go back to 1959, when the original working group was founded. The first ZAS was active until the end of the 1980s. Two generations later, a group of ETH students picked up where it left off a few years ago. "We came across the ZAS in a roundabout way and found ourselves in its work," explains one member. "The ZAS* wants to counteract the wave of new replacement buildings," says someone else. "So it was obvious to reuse the name."
As back then, the aim is not only to express opposition to the official proposals for urban development issues, "but to always justify this opposition with transformative counter-proposals for urban design", as the website states. The collective engages in constructive criticism. And as in the past, the composition of the group is handled loosely. Around 20 to 30 people are currently involved in the association on a part-time basis. It is not clear who exactly is involved on the website. "Authorship is not important to us," explains an architect. "We don't want to distinguish ourselves as individuals, it's about the content." In 2023, the working group gave a collective lecture at the Department of Architecture entitled "In mutual complicity" to introduce itself as a visiting studio.
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The members of ZAS* during collaborative writing -
Ideas competition for Triemli City Hospital
Since the beginning, ZAS* external page has regularly written columns in the city magazine tsüri.ch to stimulate public discourse and put pressure on politicians. The group made a name for itself in 2022 when it organized a speculative ideas competition for the three former staff houses of the Triemli City Hospital in Zurich. Instead of demolishing the buildings, as originally planned, the competition sought proposals for the conversion and further use of the 750-room complex. The proposals submitted were exhibited at the ZAZ Bellerive, and a contribution about the process was shown at the Akademie der Künste Berlin. The efforts to preserve the building have paid off: the city of Zurich does not intend to demolish the property until 2040. It has currently set up asylum accommodation in the building.
ZAS* also sees the call back to ETH as an opportunity to question and try things out. The aim is to continue working as a group with the students. Required is not individual work, but joint discourse. "We want to develop an understanding of the city as a collective," says one architect. The theme will be Zurich and the aim is to work locally. "Self-empowerment is important to us," explains one member. "We want to encourage students to get actively involved and take on a different role." As an architect, this means not simply fulfilling the spatial program, but questioning the task itself, for example. Just as ZAS* did in the competition for the new replacement building for the Salzweg housing estate in Zurich, when it submitted around 40 questions about the brief instead of a project.
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The ZAS* during a city walk -
The ZAS* at a conference of the Academy of Arts Berlin
Preparing the ETH visiting studio ties up a lot of resources. In addition, ZAS* has applied for and been awarded the contract to use the culture pavilion on Werdmühleplatz in Zurich. It will set up an "Office for Urban Development" ("Ämtli für Städtebau") in the pavilion for two years in order to hold ongoing public discussions. Because "information is co-determination", as the old ZAS put it in 1970. In addition, there are many topics on the table that the ZAS* would like to tackle. The group has a whole list of locations, for example a factory building in Zurich Oerlikon Nord that is being demolished. "But we think carefully about where and when we become active," says one architect. Targeted involvement in the urban debate can achieve a lot, as the example of the Triemli City Hospital has shown.
Incomplete list of ZAS* members
Lucio Crignola, Milena Buchwalder, Tobia Rapelli, Alice Tripet, Blanka Dominika Major, Ella Eßlinger, Gaëtan Iannone, Jakob Junghanss, Jens Knöpfel, Julian Wäckerlin, Lukas Ryffel, Lian Liana Stähelin, Meghan Rolvien, Oliver Xaver Burch, Sonja Flury, Sebastian Oswald, Tamino Kuny, Jakob Walter, Christoph Zille
Visiting studios
Every year the Department of Architecture invites six visiting studios, that teach design for one to four semesters. They are selected by the institutes with the involvement of the professors, the mid-level academic staff and the students. In the fall semester 2024, in addition to the landscape architect Céline Baumann and the architects Oliver Lütjens and Thomas Padmanabhan, the department is welcoming the ZAS* association, the architect Lillit Bollinger, the architect Gilles Retsin and Anja Beer and David Merz from the Beer Merz architecture office as design guests.