About us
Mission Statement
Technology is advancing rapidly. This development offers outstanding opportunities for future design, construction and operation of buildings. It also includes the ubiquity of data at all stages of the process, computational resources that are increasingly mobile, new additive manufacturing processes and visualisation techniques, and a plethora of methods to analyse and learn from data. From service to design, technology has transformed to a constituent element of architecture, opening up new pathways to more ecological, economical and healthier buildings, new forms, organisations and aesthetics for future cities.
The Institute of Technology in Architecture (ITA) is a leading platform for research and teaching of technology in architecture, in disciplines such as structural design, digital fabrication, energy and building systems, building processes and computational design. The eight professorships and 200 members of ITA are involved in leading global research projects such as the Singapore-ETH Future Cities Lab, the EU external page Climate KIC and the external page Swiss Competence Center of Energy Research (SCCER). With four connected lab facilities, ITA features a globally unique experimental research infrastructure. The Robotic Fabrication Laboratory (RFL), the 3D Printing Lab, the Concrete Materials Lab and the Adaptive Building Systems Lab (to be completed in 2020) constitute a network of connected laboratories. They allow large-scale testing of building components and systems on a full scale, across multiple domains. To test for applicability under realistic conditions, ITA researchers frequently advance lab-based research to living labs outside of ETH, such as at the external page NEST living labs DFAB House and HiLo and the external page UWCSEA office living lab in Singapore. Living labs allow the transfer from research to innovative practice and involve leading industry partners from design, engineering and construction.
Besides advancing knowledge by research in the respective fields, ITA focuses on educating the next generation of architects, building engineers and consultants. In ITA courses, collaborative design studios and integrated design projects, students of both Bachelor/Master Architecture and of Master Integrated Building Systems learn how to think about and work with technology, obtain literacy and proficiency with theory, techniques and toolsets. Students work on real design problems on different scales, from components to cities, from construction detail to a digitally shaped landscape. On the graduate level, the Doctoral Program in Architecture & Technology at ITA is oriented toward the training of excellent and independent scholars focusing on architecture, building engineering, digital fabrication and computational technologies. It is highly interdisciplinary and, consequently, managed and supervised collaboratively by the ITA professorships. Since its inauguration in 2012, 18 scholars have been granted a fellowship. Graduates of the program have been very successful in obtaining academic positions at leading research institutions all over the world.
