ABSTRACT
Professor Dirk Hebel, Assistant Professor of Architecture and Construction at ETH Zurich, has been pushing the boundaries of architectural teaching. His work considers ways to ‘activate’ unusual building materials, which over the years have included air, water, bamboo, and, most recently, locating sources of waste material. The project, in partnership with housing cooperative GMBZ, involves the design and construction of 140 apartments plus a kindergarten, common areas for residents and a shared laundry. The project highlights that many natural resources are becoming increasingly scarce, even aggregates such as sand and gravel for concrete production. It also focuses on the potentials of other material sources or ‘flows’ that have piled up over centuries – the materials that constitute our towns and cities that can now be conceived as our future ‘mines’.
