Archive Seminar: Visual storytelling in the Archive

The Archive Seminar “Visual storytelling in the Archive,” conducted in Spring Semester 2025, has sought to bring students into the gta Archive at ETH Zurich. Despite being Switzerland’s largest and most important architecture archive, the gta Archive is nevertheless underused in teaching. Some students even complete their architecture training without having visited the archive or even knowing of its existence. In reaction to this situation, the Archive Seminar has had two aims. Firstly, to increase the visibility of this architectural repository by unlocking its didactic potential. To that end, it has staged direct, rich encounters between students and archival material by familiarising the seminar participants with the holdings and the use of the archive. Secondly, it has attempted to upscale this experience by inviting students to produce short videos articulating a historical narrative by using archival materials. The resulting videos have been uploaded as open educational resources to the gta Archive website (link https://archiv.gta.arch.ethz.ch/en/visual-storytelling-ss2025).

With over 300 collections of regional, national and international importance, the gta Archive represents a substantial resource for research. Through guided and structured access to the archive, this seminar has managed to familiarise students with concepts of archival study and has imparted research methods that will assist them in the completion of their design studio, Master Thesis, and doctoral courses. This course can also highlight research potential and aptitudes, possibly encouraging Master students to pursue a PhD in architectural history.

As the first and successful collaboration between the gta Archive (as Content Experts) and MML (Media and Learning Experience Designers), the Archive Seminar has fostered subject specific, method-specific, as well as transferable competencies. Under guidance, students were helped to identify archival evidence for the construction of historical narratives, which they presented as storyboards and scripted video shorts before their revision and final screening. The resulting student videos were sustainably conceived as future teaching and study tools for a variety of courses at D-ARCH. They are now accessible to ETH lecturers and students, professionals, and interested public.

The Archive Seminar took place in 4-hour weekly sessions throughout Spring Semester 2025. The teaching programme was developed in close coordination between the gta Archive (Irina Davidovici as lecturer and coordinator, assisted by Almut Grunewald for archival consultations, Luca Can for teaching, scientific and archival support, Helin Can as teaching assistant) and MML (Jeanine Reutemann as lecturer and coordinator, assisted by Robin Bretscher, Alexander de Biasi, and Carlo Picaso as lecturers, video and sound design, post-production support). The substantial weekly contact time was deemed necessary to accommodate the technical challenges of the task and the time needed to offer feedback to the students’ individual work.

The teaching syllabus was divided into input sessions from both teams consisting of exercises and discussions, coaching, workshops, and screenings. From the side of gta, the inputs were intended to build theoretical as well as practical bases for understanding and working in the archive and included a guest lecture by scholar and artist Denise Bertschi. The gta Team also prepared thematic selections of archival material that were distributed among the students and assisted them in consulting the archive to complement their sets of evidence with other material, which was then digitised and put at their disposal. On the side of the MML team, an excellent series of inputs familiarised students with the format and design of the video essay, including content-related (narrative writing) as well as technical (audio and visual design) themes. All taught course information was subsequently distributed via E-Doz emails as well as a shared Miro board. Intermediate and final outputs (storyboards, scripts, animatics and rough cuts, final videos) were shared on Polybox and discussed in individual tutorials as well as group sessions. The graded assessments provided by the gta Team were shared for comment to the MML team. The grades reflect the accomplished final videos and the students’ high level of commitment.

The Archive Seminar has fostered expert skills (independently work in the archives, the systematic selection of research evidence to create viable historical narratives) as well as method-specific competencies (the analysis and evaluation of media and digital technology, project management). Students acquired and demonstrated ability to prepare storyboards, animatics, and scripts and edits for short videos presenting thematic historical narratives.
In addition, participants developed social (communication, group work, sensitivity to diversity) as well as personal competencies (critical thinking, creativity and self-management).

The pilot Archive Seminar started with 18-20 students and ended with six. The final outcome of the project consists of a white paper and five videos, rather than the 10-12 videos initially predicted. This reduction in student numbers had the advantage of sufficient contact during workshops, screenings, and tutorials. It is unlikely that, should the number of students had stayed as high as at the beginning, they would have had the ample qualitative and quantitative feedback that the team was thus able to provide.

One reason for the students drop was the high workload especially for the design studio, which is understandably prioritised in architecture training. Bad health contributed in two cases, and, in at least one case, the withdrawal of one student caused their video partner to also drop out. This course has indicated a misalignment between the seminar format, including the high number of credits, and its task. Most students cannot provide a significant seminar output during a regular semester in an architecture studio. Additionally, less time was spent in the archive than on the basics of video-making, a skill that is very unevenly distributed among architecture students. For those without prior film-making experience, technical inputs were essential.

As a result of these observations, the course will continue in future semesters with the following changes:
• The Archive Seminar will adopt a lighter format. Under the new name ‘Critical Thinking in the Archive’ and a with lower credit weight of 2 ECTS, it will focus on bringing students into the archive for guided discussions and thematic presentations on archival material, resulting in short essays that will be published on the archive website.
• The video-making component will be continued under the different format of a Focus Work (Vertiefungsarbeit) that will give students 6 ECTS over 6 months and the ability to work independently of the semester structure.
• The Focus Work (Vertiefungsarbeit) will be based on the white paper resulting from the MML and gta collaboration in the SS 2025, and will target specifically students that have already the required video and editing skills.