© Basile Bornand

Faced with the landscape, it often seems that one would do best to simply bend and stay silent, but a debate can only become truly stimulating when the participant confronts it with eloquence, as does the Basel practice of Daniel Buchner and Andreas Bründler, whose grasp of context exceeds the hackneyed deference to address it in all its complexity. Their buildings may look autonomous, but all of them remedy fragments of the respective places and provide a solid identity, helped by an exquisite and atmospheric treatment of concrete – perhaps the only leitmotiv to be discerned in this selection of six design discourses devoid of inopportune pet words.