Student work holdings “Building School”
Aim of the project
- Digitization of the student works from the Bauschule collection stored in the gta archive
- Linking the digital copies with the existing metadata in the gta archive database
- Publication of the image data and metadata on the research portal of the gta archive
Description of the project
The photographic documentation of most of the diploma projects and numerous semester projects from the architecture department of the ETH Zurich between 1903 and 1958, held in the gta archive, comprises seven folders and 30 archive boxes with around 3,500 sheets. Around 1500 designs are documented under the influential diploma professors Gustav Gull, Karl Moser, Otto Rudolf Salvisberg and Hans Hofmann.
The documents were digitised integrally and professionally in collaboration with Gubler Imaging, and the digital copies were then linked to the metadata in the archive database and finally published on the gta archive research portal.
There they were automatically linked to the existing person norm data entries for the respective students and finally manually linked to the hundreds of original plans of student works that are available in other holdings of the gta archive (the estates of former students or professors).
Synergies and context
The materials are of great importance both for the memory of the architecture department and for research. They also supplement the materials relating to teaching at ETH Zurich that are kept in the university archives at the ETH Library, such as lecture catalogues, matriculation records and school council minutes. In addition to research, the materials will also be made available for teaching, initially in the spring semester of 2025, for the seminar Visual Storytelling in the Archive, led by the gta Archives. A research and publication project on architectural teaching according to Semper is also planned. Semper's teaching has already been examined by Martin Tschanz in his doctoral thesis (Die Bauschule am Eidgenössischen Polytechnikum in Zürich. Architekturlehre zur Zeit von Gottfried Semper (1855–1871), gta Verlag, Zurich 2015).
Time frame
January 1 to December 31, 2024