ETH Zurich

Research

Architecture History

• A temple to science | ETH Zurich This detailed institutional account of the ETH main building's construction reveals critical decisions about material expression—Semper's upper façades were rendered in plaster over brick rather than sandstone ashlar due to budget constraints—and documents Gull's radical transformation of the interior spatial envelope, including the conversion of the single-storey Antikensaal into a multi-storey hall crowned by a dome.

• History of Architectural Education at ETH Zurich – Department of Architecture | ETH Zurich This institutional timeline traces the evolution of ETH's architecture from Semper's founding pedagogy through Gull's reforms, contextualizing how the building's material and spatial transformations paralleled shifts in architectural education—from Beaux-Arts atelier culture to modernist systematics under Bernhard Hoesli.

• Gustav Gull (1858-1942). Architekt, Städtebauer, Visionär This recent monograph by Cristina Gutbrod (2025) offers a scholarly treatment of Gull as a 'free student of Semper,' including a dedicated chapter on the ETH Hauptgebäude renovation where Gull's Späthistorismus material language—incorporating historical building fragments as tectonic 'Versatzstücke'—directly engages questions of material honesty and enclosure.

• Semperaula | ETH Zurich This richly detailed page on the Semper Auditorium documents its material constitution—wooden stucco structure, off-white walls with subtle gilding, opal glass lighting—and its spatial enclosure as a ceremonial interior whose decorative programme and gallery configuration embody Semper's theories of Bekleidung and architectural interiority.

• Gustav Gull (1858–1942) – ETH-Bibliothek This ETH Library portrait situates Gull's architectural practice within 'repräsentativer Späthistorismus,' detailing his tectonic strategies of incorporating existing rooms and building elements as historicist assemblages—a practice directly relevant to questions of material honesty and the transformation of spatial enclosures at the ETH campus.

Critical Theory

• Semperaula | ETH Zurich The Semperaula's decorative programme—personifications of Scientiae and Artes, ceiling paintings referencing Zurich's academic disciplines—renders the auditorium as a total work of enclosure in which surface decoration, material palette, and spatial containment are theoretically unified under Semper's concept of architecture as cultural representation.

• A temple to science | ETH Zurich Semper's characterization of the ETH as a 'temple to the sciences and arts' invites critical reading through his own theoretical framework of Bekleidung: the material compromises (plaster over brick in lieu of stone) and Gull's subsequent spatial reconfigurations expose tensions between representational ambition and material contingency central to Semperian critical discourse.

• Gottfried Semper (1803–1879) – ETH-Bibliothek | ETH Zürich This biographical portrait links Semper's early polychromy research—his radical thesis that ancient architecture was originally painted—to his later theoretical writings including 'Die vier Elemente der Baukunst' and 'Der Stil,' foundational texts for critical theories of material cladding, surface, and the textile origins of architectural enclosure.

• Gustav Gull (1858-1942). Architekt, Städtebauer, Visionär Gutbrod's monograph frames Gull's ETH interventions as a critical dialogue with Semper's legacy, examining how his late-Historicist approach to material assemblage and spatial reorganization negotiated tensions between preservation ideology and modernizing institutional enclosure.

Psychoanalysis & Architecture

• A temple to science | ETH Zurich Semper's conception of the ETH as a 'temple'—a monumental spatial envelope for collective scientific identity—lends itself to psychoanalytic readings of institutional architecture as a projective container: the building's contested interiority (students were 'least enthusiastic' about its disciplinary spaces) reveals the ambivalence between sheltering enclosure and institutional control.

• Semperaula | ETH Zurich The Semperaula's elaborately enclosed interior—its off-white walls, gallery balustrades, ceiling allegories of human culture—functions as what might be read through Winnicottian terms as a 'holding environment,' where the material and decorative envelope constructs a ceremonial space of collective identification and sublimation.

• Bibliothek der Rechtswissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Universität Zürich Calatrava's insertion of a domed library within the unused courtyard of a historic building—invisible from the street, a 30-meter-high light court sealed beneath a structural shell—presents a psychoanalytically suggestive figure of interiority: a hidden enclosure within an enclosure, where knowledge is spatially contained in an architecturally internalized void.

Film Theory & Architecture

• Semperaula | ETH Zurich The Semperaula's orchestration of surface, light, and material texture—from gilded mouldings to opal glass spheres dissolving in their upper thirds—constitutes a scenographic interior that invites analysis through film-theoretical frameworks of mise-en-scène, where the architectural envelope functions as a total spatial staging of cultural narrative.

• Gottfried Semper (1803–1879) – ETH-Bibliothek | ETH Zürich Semper's career-long engagement with theatrical architecture—from the Dresden Hoftheater to the Vienna Hofburgtheater—and his relationship with Richard Wagner establish a direct genealogy between architectural enclosure and performative spectacle, connecting his ETH work to broader questions of architecture as spatial dramaturgy relevant to film-theoretical inquiry.

• A temple to science | ETH Zurich The narrative of Semper's material compromises—sandstone facades reduced to plastered brick, sculptural programmes eliminated—and Gull's subsequent spatial restaging of the interior through dome and reoriented entrance can be read through a film-theoretical lens as successive acts of architectural 'editing,' where the building's surface and enclosure are continually reframed.