United in professional practice and friendship, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron together turn 70 this spring, and Basel, the birthplace of both, celebrates with them. Though the best of architects are not always prophets in their own land, these two definitely have been – just like Palladio, Villanueva, or Schinkel before them. Of course lots of circumstances of different nature have had to do with this recognition enjoyed at home, but these can be summarized in two words: confidence and fidelity. On one hand is the trust that local clients – public and private alike, and small clienteles before large corporations– have put in Herzog & de Meuron in the course of forty years, giving the extraordinary duo the opportunity to carry out disciplined buildings like the ones Focho draws on the opposite page, from the Blue House to the Vitra Schaudepot by way of the Rudin House or the Schaulager, every one of them bearing the unmistakable imprint of Aldo Rossi, their professor at the ETH Zurich. On the other hand is H&deM’s unswerving loyalty to the tenacious experimental vocation found in all of their works, and to Basel itself, the city where they live and run their firm, and which thanks to them has become one of Europe’s architecture capitals.