The Archives of the Institute for History and Theory of Architecture (gta Archives) concentrate on the collection of bequests by Swiss architects and architectural critics, authors and photographers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Founded in 1967, the gta Archives emerged from the so-called «Semper Museum», which was established by students of Gottfried Semper after his death in 1879. Today they comprise nearly 200 bequests, the Archive of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) as well as the Archive of the Bund Schweizer Architekten (BSA), miscellaneous collections of pictures, audiotapes and films and a library linked to the NEBIS network. Latest additions include documents of regional and national planning processes as well as landscape architecture. These collections are acquired and looked after in cooperation with Network City and Landscape NSL.
gta Archives are an important centre of excellence on both a national and an international level. One third of their readers are from abroad. The Archives continually and strongly support a wide range of different research projects concerning their holdings. They assist external and internal research, exhibitions and publications; support PhD candidates and their studies; act as consignor; and do their own research projects. In recent years, large project cooperations within the Insitute have become central for the gta Archives, in particular the seminal publications about Gottfried Semper, ETH‘s buildings and Haefeli Moser Steiger architects.
New acquisitions in recent years have focussed on the protagonists of Swiss architecture after 1945, among them the archives of Ernst Gisel and Fritz Haller, the bequests of Claude Paillard, Alfons Barth and Jacques Schader. Important acquisitions are coming up shortly and concern for instance the archives of Eduard Neuenschwander and the bequest of Claude Schnaidt.