“For the Romans, the circus was the world.”
— Isidore of Seville
At the end of the 1980s, Milan was still a largely unfamiliar city to many, one that people usually drove around on their way south. Yet from Zurich it is the nearest major city. I had had enough of Protestant Zurich, wanted to get away, and Milan seemed to me like an unknown promise.
At the time, the literature on the city and its architecture was sparse. At the same time, the first studies of Milan’s postwar architecture were emerging at ETH Zurich - among other things on the initiative of Marcel Meili - with figures such as Moretti, Asnago Vender, and Caccia Dominioni.
After a thorough analysis of the city, I developed a project for a dance theatre that overlaid the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre in the sense of a palimpsest.
I was supervised by Flora Ruchat, Hans Kollhoff, Dieter Geissbühler, and Mike Guyer - a truly luxurious and promising starting position. They gave me great freedom and trust. There was a crackling atmosphere of creativity and anticipation.
The free master’s thesis was my most formative and beautiful experience at ETH Zurich.
Felix Wettstein is a principal of studio we architettura in Lugano, Switzerland. From 1995 to 2009 he was associate of Giraudi-Wettstein architects in Lugano. Their most renowned projects are published extensively worldwide and illustrated in a monografie published by Quart Verlag, Luzern in 2010. Felix Wettstein was born in Zurich in 1962. After an exchange program at the Harvard University GSD in Cambridge USA he graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich in 1988. He worked for Rafael Moneo in Madrid and Manuel Sola-Morales in Barcelona before starting his own practice in Switzerland. From 1993 to 2000 he taught at the ETH Zurich, and he has been a visiting critic and gave lectures at many international schools including the Accademia di architettura in Mendrisio, the Harvard GSD and the Universidad di Navarra (Pamplona). From 2013 to 2023, he was president of the Bellinzona Landscape Commission and from 2005 until 2015 he served as a member of the Sachverständigenrat of St. Gallen. He’s also member of Redaktionskommission werk, bauen + wohnen (Zurich) since 2014 and member of numerous competition juries. Since 2015 he is in charge of the focus Architecture and Structure in the Master of Arts in Architecture at HSLU – T&A in Lucerne.
Click here to see his diploma.
