Herzog & de Meuron, Messe Basel New Hall, Switzerland (2002-2013)

If there is a material that clearly illustrates how technological progress is applied to architecture, it is aluminum. Despite this metal’s presence in numerous areas of everyday life, it is, from a historical perspective, very recent. Not until the early 19th century was the existence of this metal established, and only in 1825 did the Danish scientist Hans Christian Oersted manage to obtain traces, however impure, of aluminum. But the progress through that century was spectacular and in 1886, Paul Héroult and Charles Hall separately patented methods that made mass production of aluminum possible for the first time, giving rise in 1889 to the first factories in Switzerland and the United States...
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