What if the public building as we know it has become obsolete, but public life has not? Churches, town halls, libraries, cinemas and stations once gave form to collective life. Many of their functions have moved into the private sphere: online, at home, onto a screen or into our headphones. Yet our need for places to meet, learn, care, reflect, produce, celebrate and simply be together has not disappeared. This semester, we are interested in formulating new types of public interiors.
The 2026 Global Justice Report provides our starting point. We will not treat it as a blueprint, but as an agenda to be tested through architecture. If working time is reduced to twenty-five hours a week, how will we inhabit the time gained? If care, education, culture and well-being become the foundations of prosperity, what spaces will they require? Global justice is not only made through economics and politics. It is also made through space.
EUTOPIA literally means a good place. We will investigate architectural proposals with a eutopian ambition — built and unbuilt — as precedents from which we can learn. We will look for spatial capacities, organisational inventions, forms of architectural generosity — but also for contradictions, exclusions and dependencies.
Our testing ground is Zürich-West: alongside the backbone of Hardbrücke Viaduct we find the Maag Halle, the Welti-Furrer Areal, the former Jumbo DIY, the car wash. Rather than treating them as speculative commodities, we will read them as complex social and material landscapes, each with their own histories, capacities and forms of publicness.
We will read, compare, question and design, with a focus on public interiors and the conditions that support collective life: shelter, encounter, care, study, culture and production. The question is not simply what these buildings can become, but what kind of public life they can make possible — and for whom.
Eutopia is not a predetermined good place; it is a way of engaging with the possibility of making one.The future is not waiting to be discovered. It has to be made public.