Interviews 

Louisa Hutton, an Artisan of Welfare

Antonio Lucas 
31/10/2016


Louisa Hutton (Norwich, 1957) takes the city as a concept and as a starting point. It was almost thirty years ago that the firm Sauerbruch Hutton was set up in London, to later move its main office to Berlin. She studied at the Architectural Association at the time when Rem Koolhaas, Peter Wilson, and Peter Solter were teaching there. She herself would teach in AA classrooms years later, like her partner and husband, Matthias Sauerbruch. In 1990, the company GSW commissioned them to design their headquarters in Berlin and their career took off in a gallop. What they have kept up since those beginnings is an interest in industrial structures, free forms, and explorations with color (polychromy in the skins of buildings), always with determination and daring. In the development of (passive and active) technology they opt for aesthetic pleasure as well as the study of materials, attention to the perceptions of users, and a construction process without dissonances. The project always has its seed in sustainability, and they were in the first crop of pioneers in this area, through works like the GSW building, the Photonikzentrum, and the German Federal Environmental Agency. Their investigations reach high levels of delicacy, as in the Immanuel parish complex in Cologne, which presents a reinterpretation of the basilica structure...
[+]


Included Tags: