Luis Fernández-Galiano   Switzerland is indeed an exceptional country. Exceptional in its affluent fortress of caution, and exceptional also in a stubborn reluctance to linkage, this Alpine haven is at the same time a precinct of exclusive privilege and a redoubt of resistan

Martin Steinmann, Jacques Lucan   This text is an excerpt from the conversation between the French Jacques Lucan and the Swiss Martin Steinmann regarding ‘A Matter of Art’, an exhibition on current Swiss architecture held at the Centre Culturel Suisse of Paris in the spring of 2001.

Justo Isasi   Concrete is the earthly material. The artificial stone that constitutes the foundation of modern architecture is also the material of which the building is made, when neither transparent nor organic. The compactness of concrete, which conceals the ta

Justo Isasi   Wood is the material of tradition. A material which industrial construction relegated to domestic architecture, claddings, and the manufacturing of carpentry. For modern architecture, wood was an organic element first applied by Nordics on the minera

Justo Isasi   Metal is the material of industry. Smelted, rolled, hardened, and polished, metal is like a parallel of glass and like its antimatter: resistent and opaque, but sensitive to water and air. As if to please a postmodernity interested in superficial att

Justo Isasi   Glass is what dreams are made of. The expressionists dreamt of buildings as crystals, but the moderns raised true buildings of glass. And the crystalline form, with its polyhedral geometric laws and ethical alchemy, gave way to the transparent facade

Morger & Degelo   Switzerland   Within the initiative undertaken to provide its merely functional buildings with a distinctive profile, the Swiss railway company called a competition for the design of a prototype that should house the electric transformers and signaling machinery,

Jean Pierre Dürig, Philippe Rami   Switzerland   In spite of carrying a considerable number of flights – a result of its strategic position in the heart of Europe –, the Zürich-Kloten airport does not have a building plan able to face a series of functions in continuous growth and change. The heter

Miller & Maranta   Switzerland   The colilision of different urban plans spatially characterizes the St. Johann quarter, a conglomeration of closed housing blocks and open industrial construction located on the west periphery of Basel. The large number of foreigners who live in this

Livio Vacchini, Silvia Gmür   Switzerland   The changes in society along the last decades have given rise to relationships of cohabitation that would have been unthinkable only one generation ago. Registered couples, one-parent families, singles sharing apartments and a long etcetera frequentl

Jérôme de Meuron, Markus Wespi   Switzerland   In the town of Flawil, next to St. Gallen, stands a single-family house which was to be extended and provided with a thermal insulation in accordance with the current requirements. The house, one of the first prefabricated constructions raised on Swi

blum und grossenbacher   Switzerland   In the locality of Grossdietwil, where a fabric scattered with dwellings and industries gives way to a tapestry of prairies and pastures, stands a carpenter’s workshop that has belonged to the same family for four generations. An empty plot of land c

Gion Antoni Caminada   Switzerland   At almost 1,500 meters above sea level, Vrin is the last village in the valley of Lumenzia, a Romanche-speaking enclave in the Grisons Canton where it seems time does not go by. With more than half of its 280 inhabitants devoted to agriculture and st

Marcel Meili, Markus Peter, Zeno Vogel   Switzerland   With the Jura’s mountain range as backdrop, Biel is a middle size city located on the invisible line that separates the German-speaking Switzerland with the French-speaking one. The extended use of wood in the region as construction material justifie

Bearth & Deplazes   Switzerland   The popularization of winter sports since the Second World War has scattered the idyllic Alpine landscape with hotels, cabins, shelters and, most of all, small but abundant technical installations to allow the massive access of sport enthusiasts to t

Michael Gräfensteiner, Stefan Camenzind   Switzerland   Close to Zurich, in the locality of Uster, a new sports pavilion was to extend with three additional courts the Buchholz sports development, which runs along the sides of the highway. The restricted budget led to build a simple volume out of a limite

Diener & Diener Architekten   Switzerland   The Schweizerhof hotel is one of the buildings which speaks today about the leisured rhythm with which the city of Lucerne looks onto the Lake of the Four Cantons. The project to substitute the coach house and the kitchen wing for the new headquarter

Gigon Guyer Architects   Germany   The moorland which witnessed the battle of Varus – where the Teutonic warriors set a trap for the Roman troops – is today an important archaeological research center whose collection had to be made known to the public. With the purpose of framing the

Galletti & Matter architectes   Switzerland   The transversal U-profile of the Rhone Valley is a practical lesson in Geology along its Swiss stretch. The glacial formation of the valley opens up in a plain flanked by mountainous massifs which gives a glimpse of the flow of the rivers of ice that

Inés Lamunière, Patrick Devanthéry, Gabriel de Freudenreich   Switzerland   Built by raising independent structures within a thick vegetation, the campus of Dorigny extends the linear park which accompanies the banks of Leman Lake to the southwest of Lausanne. In this tree-lined context, a new pavilion has been added to the

Herzog & de Meuron   Switzerland   Brimming with an audience devoted to the color of its team, the football stadiums today still have that symbolic character of places of cult that once attracted swarms of pilgrims, but today’s tendency to increase their profitability through addition

Bétrix & Consolascio   Switzerland   On the periphery which extends to the west of Zug, the former communal prairies have given way to a landscape ruled by the standardized dimensions of the sports fields and a series of temporary pavilions that will be pulled down in a medium-term peri