Transforming buildings for the future

Our goal

The refurbishment of the HIL building on the Hönggerberg campus offers ETH Zurich a unique opportunity to develop new approaches to the sustainable transformation of existing buildings through the “Living Lab HIL”. In an initial phase, innovative solutions based on the principles of Reuse, Repair and Maintain will be researched, tested and demonstrated directly under real-world conditions. The aim is to develop practical concepts for working with existing buildings and to accelerate the transfer of successful approaches into industry.

As a real-world laboratory that is unique worldwide, the “Living Lab HIL” demonstrates how existing buildings can be developed further with a significantly smaller environmental and economic footprint. In doing so, the project makes an important contribution to the circular economy and the sustainable renewal of the building stock.

Your support enables

• interdisciplinary research and demonstration projects to be carried out at the HIL building;
• collaboration between research and industry to further develop successful solutions;
• the transfer of scientific findings into practice and their scaling for broader application.

Whether through a small or large contribution, your support helps researchers and students develop and test innovative solutions for sustainable building refurbishment directly in an existing building.

Initial approaches

As part of Master’s theses and semester projects, ETH students have already developed initial concepts and visualisations for the “Living Lab HIL”.