René Furer’s Semantic and Syntactic Analysis: Venturi and Vignola at ETH Zurich

Abstract

This paper explores the response of the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH Zurich) to the student unrest of 1968. Specifically, it analyses the teaching of Swiss architect and educator René Furer on architectural theory. One of the key examples is Furer’s lecture on mannerism, in which both sixteenth-century and contemporary projects were used to illustrate “semantic” and “syntactic” dimensions of architecture. The terminology and pluralist content of the lecture show how mannerism was related to the notion of architecture as language and to nascent postmodernism. By highlighting this episode, the paper challenges the prevailing narrative of Swiss architecture as a bastion of modernism, suggesting that teaching at ETH was more in tune with international developments than previously thought.