Doctoral Candidate: Maria Kouvari
Co-Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Tom Avermaete, Professorship for History and Theory of Urban Design, ETH Zurich
This dissertation explores the built environment of Swiss child aid in the aftermath of World War Two. During this period, Swiss humanitarian aid organizations—including the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Swiss Red Cross, the Pestalozzi Children’s Village Foundation, and Swiss Relief, the latter being the first publicly-funded humanitarian body in Switzerland’s history—established transnational networks for child welfare and constructed facilities for children in war-torn countries such as Germany, Italy, Poland, and Greece. Central to this study is a close examination of two children’s villages constructed by Swiss Relief in Greece, the two largest and most characteristic of the organization’s projects, the sites of which retain tangible built artifacts even today.
The aim of the study is twofold: first, to document and analyze the built legacy of Swiss child aid through a transnational lens; and second, to reassess its contemporary value in terms of architectural significance, social history, and memory discourse. The research addresses three overarching questions: How did these two Swiss-built children’s villages in Greece come into being? How have their built environments been perceived, appropriated, transformed, and valued within their national context? And for whom, and why, is the heritage of these children’s institutions significant today?
A key contribution of this work lies in shifting the focus away from architects and built artifacts toward an underrepresented heritage group: former child residents. Many thousands of documents from over thirty institutional and private archives dispersed across two national contexts, traces on the ground, and oral testimonies have been compiled into a new, hybrid archive. Combining historicity and situated agency analysis, this study contributes to a more comprehensive and polyvocal history of architecture; prompts us to rethink heritage values and criteria in relation to underrepresented communities and transnational perspectives; and builds upon contemporary discourses on the well-being of children in the contexts of international conflict, migration, and displacement.
The research forms part of the project “A Future for Whose Past: The Heritage of Minorities, Fringe Groups, and People without a Lobby” at the Chair of Construction Heritage and Preservation, ETH Zurich, in collaboration with ICOMOS Suisse, and has been awarded grants by the Foundation for Education and European Culture, Athens, and the Sophie Afenduli Foundation, UNIL, Lausanne.
