Basel, for many, is pharmaceutical industry and finance; for others, museums and the art market; and for not a few, the city of Herzog & de Meuron, the gold standard of architecture, and it is good to retrace the journey that has led them to wield such global influence. Friends since childhood and students, both, of Aldo Rossi at ETH Zürich, we like to begin their story at the 1978 Basel Carnival, as that was when they, with Joseph Beuys, turned a Fasnacht march into a contemporary art event on the streets of the city, and the same year saw them set up their practice on Rheinschanze, where they remain today. The first projects would be indebted to the rationalism of Rossi’s sloping roofs and Beuys’s material exploration, but the combination soon gave way to works like the stone house in Liguria, which reinterpreted vernacular construction with laconic concrete geometries, or the apartments in Basel, which protected the glass facade with cast-iron lattices evoking street grates: two defiantly heterodox and exquisitely detailed works that were immediately published in the professional press, as were the dwellings raised in Basel with an elegant and rare use of wood...[+]