This fifth monograph on Herzog & de Meuron can only be presented with a zoom into the small to try out a synthesis, and with a flashback to the remote to look for an origin. The small are two stools: the X-Hocker developed for a house in Switzerland and used publicly for the first time at the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, and the Corker designed for the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in 2012, a project with Ai Weiwei. The X-Hocker is a prodigy of digital manufacturing, four wooden pieces assembled into a knot carved using CNC, which conceals its technical sophistication with the rough appearance of traditional construction. For its part, the Corker blows up a champagne cork, evoking the objects of Oldenburg, though departing from colorful sculpture to create a magical, warm furniture piece. Though they are both experimental, the first uses intelligence in pursuit of the essential while the second abridges the emotion of communion with nature, and their dialogue reconciles the eye with the skin.
The remote is explored through two epitaphs: that of Erasmus of Rotterdam on the tombstone over the humanist’s grave on a side aisle of the Basel Minster, and that of Jacob Bernoulli, which remembers the mathematician on the inscription sculpted inside the cloister of the same cathedral. Erasmus’s choice of the city to live serves to evoke the freedom of thought that made it the refuge of dissidents like Casiodoro de Reina, who published there in 1569 the first Bible in Spanish, and also the secular neutrality that allowed it to house in 1431 the ecumenical council of a deeply divided Catholic church, or in 1897 the First Sionist Congress, promoted by Theodor Herzl, and which gathered in the same Stadtcasino extended and exquisitely refurbished by H&deM (a work included in this fifth monograph). That civic freedom, which also explains its prominence in the art market or the defiant spirit of its carnival, is present in each and every one of the projects of an office that does not recognize limits.
The second epitaph is a tribute to one member of a saga of scientists, in a city that founded its university in 1460, promoted a fertile publishing activity and shifted from the printing to the chemical industry that is the base of its pharmaceutical empire. The Basel where Burckhardt, Wölfflin or Nietzsche taught was also that of Euler or the Bernoullis, because both the humanities and the sciences flourish under freedom, and today’s shine of architecture has its distant roots in that ferment that turned the city into the cultural capital of Switzerland. On the plaque of Jacob Bernoulli, his successors wanted to include the logarithmic spiral he loved, the spira mirabilis. The carver mistakenly chiseled an Archimedean spiral, but faithfully engraved his motto, ‘Eadem mutata resurgo,’ which although used later by the College of Pataphysics of Alfred Jarry, can be better adscribed to the changing and consistent work of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron.
