ELEMENTAL Nissen Wentzlaff Architekten   Switzerland   The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) held an invitation-only competition to renovate and expand its headquarters in Basel, replacing some ageing buildings. The scheme submitted by the Chilean practice of Alejandro Aravena, ELEMENTAL – in coll

Comamala Ismail   Switzerland   The Swiss studio led by Diego Comamala and Toufiq Ismail-Meyer designed this preschool in the small village of Ried-Brig, on the road that connects Switzerland’s Canton of Valais to Italy. The project is part of a plan to remodel the entrance to the

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   Switzerland   The organization that operates the world’s largest particle physics laboratory has opened a facility for scientific education and outreach, composed of several blocks pierced by a raised walkway.

Markus Schietsch Architekten   Switzerland   Stricter measures to maintain air quality and a decrease in the number of traditional burials led to the building of a new crematory, the design of which gives importance to the surrounding parkland. The facility is organized in concentric layers: fr

Christ & Gantenbein   Switzerland   Crossing a bridge is always an experience, but even more in Switzerland. From the Kappelbrücke in Lucerne with its paintings depicting events of the city’s history to the acrobatic Salginatobel built by Robert Maillart, the country is a fertile field

Herzog & de Meuron   Switzerland   The start of construction work on the Titlis Project in Engelberg, scheduled for completion in 2029, has been announced. In 2017, the firm Herzog & de Meuron was commissioned to renovate the Alpine resort of Titlis, located 3,000 meters above sea lev

Sou Fujimoto   Switzerland   A rigorously orthogonal grid is used as a composition tool in working out a flexible arrangement of the different programs housed within a center for university-level business studies. The regular scheme generates cubic modules stacked in a stepped f

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   Switzerland   As part of its mission to engage the public in science, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (known by its French acronym, CERN) is launching the Science Gateway, a new facility for scientific education and outreach. The purpose of the proj

Boltshauser Architekten   Switzerland   To ensure proper shear transfer in the horizontal joints, the rammed earth walls are provided with a vertical post-tensioning system of steel cables. This can be re-tensioned to compensate for settlements of the rammed earth...

Boltshauser Architekten   Switzerland   The project recovers the original spaces and materials from the industrial site, using a contemporary language for the new additions and rescuing the historic boiler house, the symbolic landmark of the factory and of great importance for the city...

Boltshauser Architekten   Switzerland   The 20-meter-high building is subdivided into horizontal layers that respond to the stacked spatial program. Functionally, the building is structured in three main areas: the stacked ice rinks, the high diving and competition pools, and the leisure a

Boltshauser Architekten   Switzerland   The multi-layered, transparent facade provides a view into the green inner courtyard and the atrium, which are visible from the main entrance. The naturally ventilated atrium serves as a distribution zone for the modular units...

Boltshauser Architekten   Switzerland   Though a similar site strategy is adopted for the whole complex, each family of buildings is distinctive: the houses grouped around the central courtyards are wood buildings, while the ones on the east are developed with a load-bearing masonry of ado

Boltshauser Architekten   Switzerland   The metal facade reflects the modulation of the floor plans. The photovoltaic system with color coated solar modules integrated in the cladding provides high energy efficiency, protects the interior space from excessive heat, and takes advantage of s

Boltshauser Architekten   Switzerland   With its gentle curves, the Ozeanium responds to the urban fabric and reflects its interior space, where spiral ramps welcome visitors. Except for the circulation cores that anchor the building to the site, the ground floor is a completely open-plan

Boltshauser Architekten   Switzerland   The orthogonal arrangement of the three existing buildings is extended with two new volumes and several parks, both on the ground floor and on the upper levels, which form a complex marked by the original foundations...

Pierre Yovanovitch   Switzerland   The young Victor Hugo who in 1832 was forbidden to stage Le roi s’amuse under the pretext of lèse-majesté could not have imagined that twenty years later, people would be singing his verses set to music on the streets of Venice, London, and even Hava

E2A   Switzerland   The left bank of Lake Zurich is characterized by a series of individual spatial compartments. The location of the water police at Mythenquai lies precisely on the perimeter of two such compartments: the promontory occupied by the Zurich Rowing Club a

E2A   Switzerland   In recent years, technological innovation has changed the relationship between living and working substantially: people work where they live and live where they work. This shift from a clear separation of living and working spaces to the most diverse

E2A   Switzerland   The industrial character that once shaped this area on the outskirts Zurich, and which is still partly visible today, is increasingly being overwritten by new residential buildings. One of these is this U-shaped apartment block with two well-differen

E2A   Switzerland   The existing school complex was constructed by Hans von Meyenburg from 1954 to 1956. It is dispersed across the site in a loosely staggered parallel configuration. The project strategy is based on an analysis of the existing buildings, which are unde

E2A   Switzerland   Elevated above the ground, the Center for Hearing and Language is accessed by means of a slender path that winds towards the ground level. The new school, surrounded by grand existing trees, replaces two massive provisional buildings. The L-shaped vo

E2A   Switzerland   The Hofacker school grounds, in the Hirslanden district of Zurich, consist of the school building with a gymnasium by Friedrich Wehrli, built in 1898, and a second gymnasium wing from 1938, by city architect Hermann Herter. These two existing school

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Jacques Herzog   Early on, I had two great masters: an artist, Joseph Beuys, and an architect, Aldo Rossi. With them I began to lay the intellectual and formal foundations of my architecture. Rossi was in our time the best-known professor at the school, and he had pl

1932-2020 In the same Ticino canton of his birth to which he was ever bound, Luigi Snozzi fell prey to Covid-19 on 29 December. A master of contemporary Swiss architecture, Snozzi was born in Mendrisio in 1932 and attended ETH Zurich, after which he

After twelve years of planning and building, the office of David Chipperfield has completed the new Kunsthaus Zurich extension, the fourth in the history of the neo-Greek building raised in 1910 by Karl Moser, who would be the first CIAM president. U

Domus   Jacques Herzog   In this open letter addressed to David Chipperfield, Jacques Herzog reflects on the active role that architects ought to play in post-Covid society.

Norman Foster   Speaking before a gathering of mayors from 41 cities, Norman Foster shared his optimistic view of the pandemic as an uplifting opportunity.

With the scheme it drew up for the competition to extend the Kunstmuseum Basel, Christ & Gantenbein – set up in 1998 by Emanuel Christ (Basel, 1970) and Christoph Gantenbein (St. Gallen, 1971) – became known outside Switzerland, and it has since cons

One of the recurring motifs in the already very extensive oeuvre of the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels is the spiral. If for architects in past times the spiral was an expression of movement, for Ingels it is also something that has the capacity to g

For centuries architects were at the service of religious powers-that-be, and temples had priority over all other kinds of buildings. Maybe this explains why so many of today’s veterans are so eager to be commissioned to build churches and chapels. A

Herzog & de Meuron, celebrating a career

United in professional practice and friendship, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron together turn 70 this spring, and Basel, the birthplace of both, celebrates with them. Though the best of architects are not always prophets in their own land, these

Though trained at ETH Zurich during the years of Aldo Rossi’s chair, Valerio Olgiati (Cuera, 1958) has produced an oeuvre to a large extent removed from themes like type and context. Powerful in their schematism, monolithic in their materiality, exq

Students of the Master of Advanced Studies in Digital Fabrication and Architecture program at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich have built ‘Concrete Choreoraphy,’ an installation of columns made of special concrete with the assistanc

Tributes to artists tend to be post mortem. A case in point is Le Corbusier and his pavilion in Zurich, designed as a Maison de l’Homme in which to display the collection of the gallerist Heidi Weber, but which after opening in 1967, two years after

Le Corbusier, pavilion in Zurich.

Having both graduated from ETH Zurich, and after a training period that saw them working for Rem Koolhaas and residing in cities like Rotterdam, Los Angeles, and Seoul, the brothers Piet and Wim Eckert (born in 1968 and 1969, respectively) returned t

In the Swiss city of Lausanne, and in collaboration with the local firm Atelier Cube, the Barcelona-based practice of Esteve Bonell and Josep Maria Gil recently completed the new parliament of the Canton of Vaud. Reinterpreting the typical volumes an

Among young Spanish practices, the studio set up in Barcelona in 2004 by Fabrizio Barozzi and Alberto Veiga is one of those that have most gone international, and the recently finished Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland, is the lar

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The author of ‘Design for the Real World’ is remembered with an exhibition in Gehry’s building for Vitra which stresses the continued critical relevance of his work.

On view through 10 March at the Vitra Museum in Weil am Rhein is ‘Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design,’ a retrospective on the Austrian designer and educator.

The Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, will through 10 March 2019 be hosting ‘Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design,’ the first major retrospective ever to be put together to honor the Austrian designer, educator, and activist who settle

Since its creation in 2007, the Swiss Architectural Award of the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio has made a niche for itself among the profession’s top prizes by biennially highlighting architects on the rise who have at least three major proj

Based in Palma de Mallorca, the young studio TEd’A arquitectes – headed by Jaume Mayol and Irene Pérez, recent recipient of the FAD Award for Interiors – has finished a school in the small Swiss locality of Orsonnens, fifty kilometers from Bern. The

The Seville-based firm of Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra is the winner of an international competition for the opportunity to restructure the central area of the Cornavin Railway Station in Geneva. The purpose of the project is to improve the station’s

Nicola Navone   Mendrisio  2010  
Silvana Editoriale   - 181 Pages 

Mercedes Daguerre   Milan  2010  
Mondadori Electa   - 208 Pages 

Zurich  2010  
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Roger Diener Jacques Herzog Marcel Meili Pierre de Meuron Christian Schmid   Basel  2005  
Birkhäuser  

Steven Spier Martin Tschanz   Nueva arquitectura suiza