“We’ve seen a shift over the last few years, from the early days, when certain topics were just not on the agenda, to the conversation that is now happening, at last. The Parity Group went from being the instigator of these kinds of conversations to being a platform on which a lot of different initiatives began to flourish.”
“To this day, the Parity Group remains a grassroots collective, a fluid, non-tokenizable, and hard-to-pin-down thing that is everyone’s and no one’s, and where many different kinds of people operate as placeholders for one another. Simultaneously, we have become something of an institution inside the institution, a truly effective force. And therein lies our strength.”
The Parity Group is a grassroots initiative, born at the heart of the Department of Architecture (D-ARCH) of the ETH Zurich. Started in 2014 by some of the D-ARCH junior teaching staff, the Parity Group has since steadily established itself as a platform and a network within and outside this educational institution: a platform for debate and action around issues of parity, diversity, inequality and institutional critique; and a network and meeting point for the school’s diverse elements: the students, assistants, lecturers and teachers who want to foreground these essential topics.