The Rapid Architectural Prototyping Laboratory is a do-it-yourself workshop for students and researchers at the Department of Architecture who need to build prototypes and models for their projects. We offer various tools, workshops, and expertise spanning several disciplines and scales.
Our key difference from other workshops is our focus on enabling people to use our facilities independently. We provide education and facilitate processes to help our users work towards their individual goals.
Converting ideas into models and prototypes is the core of our everyday work. This process needs to be direct, intuitive, and elegant.
Offering various classes, introductions, seminar weeks, and one-on-one consultations enables us to run an effective do-it-yourself workshop with empowered users. Everyone at the Raplab understands themselves, in addition to having extensive craft and technical expertise, as an educator and is trained in basic didactic methods.
Running an over 1100m2 model and prototyping space for 2100 students from 41 chairs requires considerable coordination and planning to accommodate our users’ teaching and learning requirements. We closely coordinate our efforts with the Group Raplab Representatives of each chair to ensure alignment.
Evaluating current trends and updating the Raplabs infrastructure to be aligned with the changes in the curriculum is one of the continuous challenges that the workshops face in their long-term development. We, therefore, regularly challenge the composition of our workshops and their infrastructure to ensure that we can provide a future-proof learning environment.
Collaborative work in workshops with diverse individuals poses high demands on processes, machine selection, and education. We extensively design our workshops to be accessible and safe. We acknowledge our responsibility to provide a safe and inclusive work environment by actively discussing the modalities of safe work with our users. Our common understanding of work safety is outlined in the four foundational workshop principles; Prepare, Act Responsably, Be Respectful, and Care .
Providing a fully functioning workshop with over 1000m2 of workshop space, over 100 machines, and several hundred hand tools requires regular and vigorous maintenance. Efficiency is a side effect of regular maintenance. We see the primary purpose of maintenance in safety and ensuring our infrastructure’s longevity.
The Raplab offers consulting to the faculty on many different levels. Most frequently, we have one-on-one discussions with students to identify the best course of action for their projects. However, we frequently also assist individual chairs with tool selection, the feasibility of their teaching projects, and construction support and offer strategic support for the department in terms of workshop development to ensure future alignment.
The Raplab is built around an extensive network of suppliers, other workshops within the ETH, and ETH platforms that enable us to do our work. The SGU, Techpool, Student Project House, RFL, and the Group Raplab Representatives are among the many ETH internal organizational units that frequently support us. We carefully maintain this network to share resources and knowledge.