These two very large books document monumental buildings. The Complete Works of Herzog & de Meuron, by Gerhard Mack, released its fifth volume (presenting projects completed between 2002 and 2004) two years after the publication of the sixth (which I myself reviewed in Arquitectura Viva 206), so as to include the Elbphilharmonie of Hamburg, a project initiated in 2002 that would take almost two decades to complete, and which in the book is accompanied by equally monumental constructions, among them the National Stadium in Beijing, known as the ‘Bird’s Nest,’ and the Tate Modern in London. Twentyfive, for its part, gathers the works that Stanislaus con Moos and Arthur Rüegg consider essential in the career of the Swiss architects, over the course of the forty years between Studio Frei of 1981-1982 and the Serpentine Gallery of 2011-2012: certainly not all of them are monumental, but the three included in the period covered by the fifth volume of The Complete Works definitely are, and they are the ones mentioned above.
Mack’s fifth installment scrupulously follows the structure established for the series, from the colorful covers inspired by Rémy Zaugg or Jacques Herzog’s inquisitive remarks on the most important projects (14 in this case, selected from the 60 documented) to the compilation of texts by the partners or the full chronology of the firm’s oeuvre, all of this preceded by an insightful article by the compiler which stresses that there were more unrealized projects during this period than in any other one covered by The Complete Works: a time that began in the shadow of 9/11 and triggered reflection on urban vulnerability, the projects of which would clash head-on with the financial crisis and the political vicissitudes that accompany grand emblematic gambles, as would happen, unfortunately, with the extraordinary City of Flamenco in Jerez, canceled in 2008 when pre-construction digging on the site had already been carried out. Other commissions did come to fruition, albeit not without snags, some as big as the new Messe Basel premises, the Bird’s Nest for the Beijing Olympics, the extension of their already iconic Tate Modern, and the no less symbolic Elbphilharmonie, the beleaguered process of which was ultimately to blame for the delay in the completion of the volume.
The book by Von Moos and Rüegg, preceded by long articles by the historian and the architect, sums up the vast oeuvre of Herzog & de Meuron with a list of buildings – carefully commented by either one or the other of the authors – that will not please everyone but is quite canonical. Many will bemoan the absence of an exquisite gem, the Prada flaship store in Omotesando, but what I do most deplore is the exclusion of Ricola Marketing, in the design of which a mutation took place that marked a significant inflection in the poetics of H&dM, and which the book perhaps acknowledges by giving the first essay the title ‘Focused Fuzziness,’ with a full-page photograph of the building by Thomas Ruff. Von Moos’s text, incidentally, ends with the statement that the search for the sublime, “albeit at the price of an overall picture that can irritatingly resemble the blur of the initial situation, is possibly Herzog & de Meuron’s contribution to the art of building today.” Sublime or blurred, the work of the Basel studio has an intellectual and poetic density that makes it deserve tributes as monumental as those rendered by these two colossal volumes.
