This year, the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at ETH Zurich is celebrating its 50th birthday. Founded in 1967, the institute has grown steadily over time. Scholars such as Adolf Max Vogt, Bernhard Hoesli, Paul Hofer, Martin Steinmann, Marcel Meili, André Corboz, Kurt Forster, Wilfried Wang, Bruno Klein, Sokratis Georgiadis, Werner Oechslin, Bettina Köhler, and, more recently, Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, Akos Moravanski, the late Andreas Tönnesmann, Mechtild Widrich, Alla Vronskaya, Martino Stierli, Samia Henni, and many others have researched and taught here. Today, the gta is comprised of Ita Heinze-Greenberg, Maarten Delbeke, Laurent Stalder and myself in four professorships and with a total of about 70 researchers. We launched a doctoral program in 2012, with two yearly grants and a cohort of about twenty graduate students. There is a program for a Master of Advanced Studies. We feature a department of exhibitions that has been active for more than three decades, a publishing department, and the largest archive of architecture in Switzerland.

Albert Toft, The Spirit of Contemplation, 1904.
Albert Toft, The Spirit of Contemplation, 1904.

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New institutes for digital fabrication are mushrooming, but today, nobody would found an institute for the history and theory of architecture. The situation was clearly different at the time of the establishment of the gta. In the late 1960s and 1970s, architectural theory was the future. Animated by the theoretical dynamics and the cultural reforms of student movements, the new generation of architects perceived the realm of theory to be an opening into and a way to move beyond the discursive obstructions of twentieth century architecture. To young architects in Zurich, New York, or Venice, theory must have appeared like a terrain vague full of possibilities, ready to be cultivated. It allowed for an escape from the oppressive heritage of the heroic founding figures of the modern movement such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius or Sigfried Giedion, whose influence had led to a static system of norms. Theory offered an alternative to the homogenization of practice and form in guise of an International Style. And it provided new positions to observe the fundamental historic changes unfolding under the eyes of the alert observers, namely the decay of heavy industry and the independence of former colonies.

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