Her projects consistently reject the idea that historic preservation means freezing buildings in time. Instead, she transforms them into platforms for new uses. An abandoned bank becomes one of the city’s most popular cafés. A former hospital provides more than 100 apartments. Industrial buildings fill with startup incubators.
In Buser’s hands, architecture is less about designing status symbols or squeezing out maximum profit than creating conditions in which communities can flourish.
Buser’s perspective has been shaped by 10 years in development work. After graduating in architecture from the renowned ETH Zurich, she spent nearly a decade in Tanzania and South Sudan, building wells, schools and homes with local materials.
“In Tanzania there was no such thing as waste,” she recalls. A piece of sheet metal discarded by one person became roofing for another family. Old timber became furniture.
Returning to Switzerland in the late 1980s was a profound culture shock. “The overabundance — and above all the wastefulness — really disturbed me.” As a mother and grandmother, “I want my daughter and grandkid to be able to continue to live on this planet and not have to emigrate to the moon.”
She traces that conviction back to reading The Limits to Growth, the landmark 1972 report from the Club of Rome. “We live on a planet that isn’t getting any bigger,” she says. “The population keeps growing. We’ve known for 50 years that we cannot continue our wasteful ways and yet we continue as if we had another planet in reserve.”
Soon after Buser’s return to Switzerland, a bakery owner commissioned her to remove a commercial kitchen that was only four years old. Rather than send it to landfill, she decided to rescue it.
That decision eventually grew into Switzerland’s first-of-its-kind building material exchange. Founded in 1996, the Basel Bauteilbörse has become a marketplace for reusable construction components: windows, doors, structural steel, sinks, kitchens and flooring salvaged before demolition. It now operates in 16 cities. A full-time “material parts hunter,” a young woman, crosses Switzerland and neighboring countries for construction material that fits the current projects.
Buser distinguishes sharply between recycling and reuse. Recycling, she says, often means crushing, melting and remanufacturing materials using energy-intensive industrial processes. Reuse preserves far more of the value that already exists. It also requires architects to relinquish total control.
Most architects begin with a design and then order the materials required to realize it. Buser reverses the process. Her team first inventories available reclaimed components — windows, steel beams, façade panels — and then designs the building around them.
If the available window is slightly larger than planned, her team adjusts the opening. “If you’re looking for a window that’s exactly 1.10 meters by 2.20 meters,” she says with a laugh, “you’ll never find one. But if you say, ‘roughly this size,’ then you can adapt the building.”
The method demands more flexibility and, she estimates, about 20 percent more time, but dramatically reduces waste. She argues that complexity should not be confused with impossibility.
That shift challenges an industry whose business model frequently depends on demolition, redevelopment and rising land values. Buser believes those incentives have distorted cities.
She still lives with her long-time partner in the house her great-grandfather bought, a modest row house in Basel built in 1875 with an idyllic backyard and pond. She was only 18 when her uncle decided to sell the house and the entire row of houses was slated for demolition, yet Buser successfully mounted an effort to keep it in the family and preserve it. The experience motivated her to study architecture, not to construct new things but to learn how to preserve buildings.
Her daughter Anne, who swore she would never follow in her mother’s footsteps, first studied social anthropology, but now oversees sustainability at one of the country’s largest construction firms. “That’s like the second rocket stage,” Buser says with a laugh, visibly proud that Anne wants to keep the historic home in the family, too. “I was the first stage of the rocket; the second stage can go much faster.”
These days, Buser is attempting to slow down. Nourishing her love of water, she continues to pilot the historic ferry across the Rhine every Tuesday evening, a wooden barge without an engine, just carried by the current. Buser was the first woman in the city’s history to become a licensed ferryperson. The simplicity appeals to her. “Why make something complicated,” she asks, “when nature already provides the solution?”
That question captures Barbara Buser’s life’s work.
As she moves towards retirement, she has transferred most of her companies into a cooperation. Yet there’s so much to do. She’s currently collecting windows; she has sent over 10,000 to Ukraine to help make houses habitable again. She also founded a foundation that carefully restores the heritage of homeowners without heirs and remodels the homes for low-income residents.
And she couldn’t say no when her most ambitious project yet presented itself: the Franck Areal, a 12,000-square-meter former Nestlé food factory on the edge of Basel.
Eventually the former factory will include affordable housing built largely with reclaimed materials, workshops, restaurants, artists’ studios, gardens, a dance center, businesses devoted to the circular economy and housing for people with disabilities under unusually secure long-term leases.
Walking through the site, as she does in the new documentary Barbara Buser, Pioneer of Sustainability, feels like visiting an enormous materials library. Shelves hold salvaged doors, railings, electrical cabinets and office furniture awaiting their next life. Marble from a former bank lobby has become restroom walls. Temporary fencing is assembled from discarded steel tubing. Concrete ceiling slabs have been cut into stair treads. A lending library rents household equipment, guest mattresses and cargo bikes to residents.
Buser laughs when asked whether she collects too much. “I can’t really throw anything away.”
For her, every discarded object represents future possibility. Proudly, Buser points to the double-glazed windows in the former Nestlé factory. They were rescued from a demolition project in Bremen, Germany. “What a waste if they had thrown that out!”
All scrolling images were taken by Martin Zeller.