From April 5, 2025 until September 14, 2025, the S AM Swiss Architecture Museum presents the exhibition ‚What Was Could Be: Experiments between Preservation and Architecture‘. An Exhibition by the S AM Swiss Architecture Museum in Cooperation with the Chair of Construction Heritage and Preservation (Prof. Dr. Silke Langenberg), ETH Zurich.

Preservation is progressive: In current efforts to shift towards more sustainable building practices (known in German as the Bauwende, or ‘building turnaround’), preservation and maintenance of the existing building stock play a central role.

Practical info

„What Was Could Be: Experiments Between Preservation and Architecture“
April 5, 2025 – September 14, 2025
S AM Basel
Steinenberg 7, 4051 Basel
Switzerland

The alteration or conversion of an existing building is considerably more resource-efficient than a comparable new build. This is leading to changes in the nature of architecture itself: where the focus used to be on new construction, building upon the built is increasingly considered the future of the discipline. In this context, the theory and practice of historic preservation also gain a new urgency.

The discipline has always regarded the built stock as a valuable resource and has developed different methods and approaches to carefully preserve the existing for the future. What can be learned from this approach and what new impulses can arise from a deeper dialogue between preservation and architecture?

The exhibition takes the 50th anniversary of the European Architectural Heritage Year of 1975 as an opportunity to look into the past, present, and future of preservation and explore new possibilities for its cooperation with architecture.