How to build in times of climate crisis?

40% of CO² emissions come from the construction sector.  In her lecture, Barbara Buser will present different strategies to avoid waste and reduce CO² emissions in architecture. Starting with the bauteilbörse, Lysbüchel, K.118 to windows for Ukraine and Werkstadt Zürich, Buser will show several pioneering projects to illustrate the strategies applied.  

Barbara Buser

After studying architecture at ETH Zurich, Barbara Buser worked for more than ten years in Africa: as a site engineer for a water supply project in southern Sudan, and building up the Maintenance Department at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.

Back in Basel, together with Eric Honegger, she opened the architectural practice baubüro in situ, the urban think tank denkstatt, the project for intermediate uses of unoccupied spaces unterdessen, and the office for circularity Zirkular, which now has over 100 employees.

Her focus lies on sustainable construction, reduction of waste and CO² emissions. She has initiated and led several important transformation projects such as Unternehmen Mitte, Gundeldinger Feld, Lagerplatz, Walzwerk, Hanro and Ziegelhof, Markthalle, etc., always starting from and valuing the existing structures, buildings and social context.

On the Lagerplatz in Winterthur, she initiated the pilot project K.118 - a six-storey building made up of 70% reused construction elements, saving 60% of CO² compared to a new construction. Buser and her team have received several awards for ecological building and sustainability, including the Swiss Grand Prix Meret Oppenheim for her life's work and the Holcim Global Gold Award for Sustainability for K.118.

Buser speaks about the urgency of reuse at conferences around the world and has been asked to join ETH Zurich as a visiting lecturer. Her latest civic action is the foundation of the volunteer association RE-WIN for the export of used but intact windows from Switzerland to Ukraine in response to the Russian invasion.

Part of the FORM SPACE ENVIRONMENT – Towards New Correalisms Lecture Series at the Institute for Art and Architecture (IKA) in Winter 2024-25, curated by Hannes Stiefel

We build. And we will need to build. And: it can be a responsible pleasure to build – building for desirable futures. We need to find ways to build differently, to accommodate new lifestyles that anticipate and adapt to radically changed conditions, and vice versa, to provoke them. New and other Correalisms are to be developed: constructions and aesthetics that are rooted in the dynamics of continuous interactions between humans and their natural and technological environments. The positions presented in this lecture series test different aspects of such New Correalisms in relation to various building practices.