“When I studied architecture at ETH Zurich, my professor, Peter Märkli, took us on a trip to Paris,” recalls 59-year-old Roger Boltshauser, founder of Zurich-based Boltshauser Architekten, of his days at Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Technology. “The first thing we saw was the Maison de Verre.” Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet’s 1932 magnum opus would leave a profound mark on the impressionable student, sparking a lifelong passion for glass blocks. Boltshauser’s other obsession is rammed earth, a material he has used on numerous occasions and whose low-carbon potential he pushed to the limits at Haus Rauch (Schlins, Austria, 2008), a family home largely built from soil excavated on-site. Although it might not seem so at first, these two interests intersect at this ETH Zurich research building, whose sleek, high-tech appearance belies its passive approach.
Shared by the departments of health science, IT, and electrical engineering, the $220 million Gloriarank Laboratory Center (GLC) sits about a quarter mile uphill from ETH Zurich’s Gottfried Semper–designed main building, next door to Zurich University’s campus. For ETH Zurich, which wanted to develop research partnerships with its sister institution, the location was so strategic that it was prepared to demolish a 1920s building to squeeze the GLC into a site that was too small for it; because of a four-story height limit (imposed by the wealthy villa owners on the hillside above), the only way to accommodate the 243,000-square-foot program was by digging deep. “Given these conditions, we wondered whether we should even enter the design competition, says Boltshauser. “If we did, we had to make something smart out of it.”
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