From Basel - Herzog and de Meuron [1 ed.] 9783035606959, 9783035608144

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From Basel Herzog & de Meuron

The photographs taken by George Dupin [] and Pierre de Meuron [] are indicated in the captions by their respective initials in square brackets. Concept: Jean-François Chevrier, Élia Pijollet In cooperation with Herzog & de Meuron: Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, Aliénor de Chambrier, Stefanie Manthey, Esther Zumsteg Translation and copyediting: Catherine Schelbert and Jonathan Fox with Katharine Wallerstein (translation, part II) Project management: Petra Schmid Production: Katja Jaeger, Amelie Solbrig Layout, cover design and typesetting: Filiep Tacq

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.

Bibliographic information published by the German National Library The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in other ways, and storage in databases. For any kind of use, permission of the copyright owner must be obtained. This publication is also available as an e-book ( ----) and in a German ( ----) and a French ( ----) language edition.

©  Birkhäuser Verlag GmbH, Basel P.O. Box ,  Basel, Switzerland Part of Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printed on acid-free paper produced from chlorine-free pulp. TCF ∞ Printed in Germany  ----

987654321 www.birkhauser.com

From Basel Herzog & de Meuron Jean-François Chevrier In cooperation with Élia Pijollet With seventy photographs by George Dupin

Birkhäuser Basel

p. 

I.

Local/global. – 1. The Firm –

2. Orientations – 3. Commissions and Skill: The Social Question – 4. Vernacular Invention – 5. The Cube – 6. The Image of the Body – 7. Territorial Intimacy and a Scale of Mobility – 8. Ornament(s) – 9. Nature as a Model of Complexity

p. 

II. Crossed Portraits. The Making of an Urban Biography. Montage Texts/Images

p. 

III. Conversation. Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, Jean-François Chevrier. Basel, June ‒, 

 ,   : Three stages of design development for the embossed and perforated copper cladding of the de Young Museum, San Francisco (competition , project ‒, realization ‒); pattern derived from a photograph of foliage

Local/global

The comments of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron cited in this text are based on diverse interviews conducted with them over

a period of some ten years, both unpublished and published in the journal El Croquis in  and .

1.

 

As its name suggests, the firm Herzog & de Meuron goes back to the meeting of two people, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, both from Basel, both born in , and both sharing surprisingly similar biographies. Established in Basel, today the firm receives commissions from practically all over the world (with the conspicuous exception of Africa). Herzog & de Meuron currently (June ) employs  architects. The founders have nine partners who hold an owning interest in the firm, including three senior partners, Christine Binswanger, Ascan Mergenthaler, and Stefan Marbach, who have been working with Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron for over twenty years. A ramified hierarchical structure has evolved progressively with the growth of the firm. JH: Pierre and I were very young when we began to work together. We have gotten into the habit of there being two of us. It’s a source of some difference to start with in terms of centers of interest, character, and so on. That may be why we work so well with partners. Ordinarily, each project is assigned to one partner and is developed in collaboration with Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. The partners oversee the projects on a daily basis and organize the work of the teams. The partners themselves work together as a team in choosing new projects but Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron have preserved a casting vote. JH: When a project comes our way, it’s very important for us to feel a real urge to work on it, especially within the context of the other projects already underway. Our work is all of the projects as a whole. We are in the fortunate position of being able to choose our projects and we do so within that larger context. It’s like a wine that depends on its terroir; every project has a certain potential, depending on the client, the budget, the landscape, the program, and the ways in which it might be implemented.

On the whole, the office is still run by the two founding partners who have retained their freedom in making strategic decisions. Pierre de Meuron basically manages the office and Jacques Herzog might be described as the partner on the move. It is, however, pointless to try to define who takes the initiative or holds responsibility for carrying out the projects.



 ⁄  JH: Our role, both Pierre’s and mine, consists of providing ideas and inspiration. We think differently but we see instantly what is missing in a project. That also comes from the independence we retain with regard to all of our work: sometimes a project needs affection, like people do, but there are times when you have to be stubborn, criticizing and changing things and maybe even abandoning the project altogether. The pace is not dissimilar to that of a university or a school: we see each team once a week or every fortnight, and later on at larger intervals. We do not go in for “group therapy”; the partners do not meet up to monitor progress on every project. That would be ridiculous, but more importantly it would create a sort of participatory democracy that would be false: architectural creation is not democratic, no more than artistic creation is. It is important to have partners with talents and skills of their own and with different cultural backgrounds. A structure of that kind ensures difference within the office. The firm selects on average some twenty projects a year. This requires draconian decisions. A project is taken on only if it sparks the interest of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, and one of the partners must be prepared and willing to take the lead. Over the years, they have come up with a consensus on the criteria for selection: the firm avoids doing work with unscrupulous developers or with organizations that are too bureaucratic. Proposals that would result in a repetition of or a variation on previous work are also regularly rejected, especially when financial conditions or the client’s profile create cause for concern about the future of the project. Since the early s, urban development projects have gained prominence in the firm’s activities in conjunction with a greater focus on the urban nature of architectural projects not only in Europe but also in “emerging” centers of the global economy (e.g., Asia and Brazil). Significantly, this investment in urban planning and development origip. -, - nated in the study Basel, A Nascent City? (‒). Now more than ever, , - proposals for Basel receive special attention and through the projects built over the past thirty years in the trinational region the offices of Herzog & de Meuron have no doubt left a remarkable inscription within the historical environs of their native city. This is the subject of the following, main section of the present publication. Architecture is an opportunistic profession that demands great lucidity when it comes to adapting to the specific conditions of each commission. The added value contributed by the architect is not quantifiable in the strict terms of a balance sheet, for it is largely symbolic and always has been. Yet, in the context of ongoing metropolitanization stimulated by



  the liberal expansion of the market, architects are more than ever producers of image. So-called iconic architecture has traditionally participated in the symbolism of power, but it also promotes competition between territories (cities, regions) in terms of attractiveness. Herzog and de Meuron are obviously conscious of this. An office that is active internationally is necessarily drawn into sensitive power games that affect significant populations. The players are subject to manipulation and expected to make compromises that may influence the reception of the project: the stadium in Beijing, for example, was interpreted as legitimizing an authoritarian regime. The firm’s interest in the urban aspect of architecture increased as its activity gained visibility with such projects as the Tate Modern p. , , , (‒) and the National Stadium for the  Beijing Olympic  Games (‒). In the s, urban sociology acquired a prominence that ultimately restricted formal invention. Herzog and de Meuron thus chose to concentrate on creating autonomous objects. But this was followed by a complete change of direction: star architects began building spectacular “amnesic” objects that are not inscribed within the urban landscape. Herzog & de Meuron responded to this trend by focusing even more on projects and studies related to urban planning. The choice of projects and the manner in which they are carried out within the firm are thus the key elements in the functioning of Herzog & de Meuron. Each project is an evolving process and may contribute to future programmatic developments. This potential has become a criterion in evaluating proposed projects. A project’s capacity to evolve reflects the experimental spirit that has always inspired the founders of this firm. JH: Like scientists or athletes, an architect’s energy can sometimes be at a low ebb. Ideally, a partner will bring so much to a project that Pierre or I don’t have to intervene. On the other hand, sometimes we are confronted with situations in which teams become closed to our intervention. At that point it is absolutely necessary to take action, add a dimension, or even jettison everything developed up to that point. It is sometimes unbearable to see a project that is practically finished, as if it were already built and no longer subject to change. Architects don’t work alone and a time always comes when they can no longer scrap everything that’s been done so far and start all over again. A lot of money has been invested and a lot of people have been involved in the planning. This inertia is a danger, but it is also an interesting condition. It can be difficult for people to see a project that they’ve been working on day after day come under fire. They tend to



: Sketch by Jacques Herzog for Roche Building 1, Roche Basel Site (first project ‒, not built). Handwritten note: “Show structure on the outside? / structure lines running in various directions – possibly visible on the outside like the contours of a section? i.e. glazing plane slightly set back?” : Visualization of the Roche Basel Site, with Building 1 in the background (project ‒, realization ‒) and the Building 2 and pRED Center projects, ongoing since 



 defend it. I can well understand that. As a student, it was very upsetting to have a teacher tear my project apart. I had not yet understood that you must always maintain a certain distance between yourself and the creative work to give it the autonomy it needs.

2.



Since  the firm has regularly seen turning points and changes of orientation. This might also be described as a push and pull between an initial assumption of what could be qualified as a “minimalist” simplicity, and a search for complexity, particularly evident in the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. In the latter case, the cost overruns, caused above all by the requirements of a multifunctional program, evinced the need to return to simplicity, equally warranted in the context of the financial crisis that began in  with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. That same year, , the company management of Roche rejected the tower design for their Basel office. The project had to be revised and simplified. PdM (August ): The project we had proposed, with two intertwined spirals, was rejected by management. It was already set for construction when they realized that they did not want to be represented by a building that stands in such great contrast to the existing architectural heritage, namely, the conspicuous statement made by a high-rise building within the urban context of Basel. We soon understood their clear and unmistakable message and had the good fortune of being able to continue the dialogue. In the end, the tower was taller but formally more understated. Most people feel that this was an improvement but there are a few who believe that it p. -, -, made the project banal. The less spectacular shape of the building proved -, , to be a good approach because it provided a compelling solution for sub- , ,  sequent phases of vertical development. Certain circumstances may well call for spectacular designs but in this case, it was advisable to aim for an understated and modest exterior, especially because the interior is of a complexity that matches the executed building. The quality of the spaces both inside and outside Roche Building 1 is unusual for a building of this height, in particular the open-air terraces accessible to staff and the threestory zones for in-house communication distributed throughout the entire building. Another project, that of the Parrish Art Museum, had a similar evolution, although on a lesser scale and for essentially budgetary reasons. According to Pierre de Meuron, the project benefited from being scaled down.



: Model of the first design for the Parrish Art Museum (project ‒) : Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, Long Island, State of New York (project ‒, realization ‒)



 PdM: The first project for the Parrish Art Museum was fairly spectacular, but the plans were quelled by the financial crisis caused by the  stock market crash. The museum asked us if we would be prepared to think about a new proposal that would cut costs by a third of the original budget. The project, which has since been completed, consists of a very strong and no less compelling solution, and seems to me an apt response to all the pretentious projects spawned by contemporary architecture— especially museums. The first project was ultimately a kind of test case that permitted us to discover and study all the different artist’s studios in Long Island, their spatial layout, and the way they use both natural and artificial light. That was the first, highly instructive and indispensable phase for working on the second project. If we had worked exclusively on the realized project, it would have lacked the conceptual clarity and obvious expressive impact. In the same interview, Jacques Herzog mentioned a change in direction for the firm, undertaken in connection with the evolution of these two projects. JH: The firm’s new projects have become much more geometric and clearcut. We are once again attracted by this notion of geometric clarity after having long been hesitant about applying it on a large scale. There is a very fine line between clarity or purity and heroic monumentality. Given proverbial “Swiss modesty,” a certain monumentality is no doubt tempting and yet also intimidating. But whatever the case, we always try to achieve simplicity and immediacy. This new simplicity appeared as a spiraling movement rather than as a simple return to the firm’s origins. The evolution of the Roche tower and Parrish Art Museum projects demonstrates how crucial flexibility is within the firm itself. PdM: When problems crop up that may even require changing direction, this not only affects the relationship with the client but also our own inhouse operations. We rely on the performance and capabilities of all the teams and every one of their members. The firm is no doubt flexible for its size, but I sometimes sense a certain inertia, a certain intellectual inflexibility that gets in the way of ideas, of criticism and self-criticism. You might compare it to sailing an ocean liner. Jacques and I set the conceptual course: we sketch ideas that are picked up within the company and used for various projects and suddenly we realize that everybody has been thinking in terms of squares because round is not allowed—so the balance has to be restored, adjustments made, misunderstandings corrected. And



 ⁄  that takes time. Sailing a liner is quite a challenge, the paramount aim being the first-rate quality of the architecture. We could decide to concentrate on the main routes, to delegate much more, such as the implementation of the planning and the site management. But we don’t want to end up relying on one single method of working and intervening. We want something much more flexible and open-ended. There is moreover an intentional diversity in the type of projects that precludes an unequivocal approach. Experimentation cannot be reduced to a strict program of research. Herzog & de Meuron has successfully introduced procedures that encourage wide-ranging experimentation. But the firm is a business. It is neither an artist’s studio nor a laboratory, though it may seem so at times, while conversely, studios and laboratories may sometimes turn into industrial or semi-industrial operations. Here, however, it is more like a laboratory that is integrated into a corporate strategy. Experimentation takes place on several levels, strategy included. p.  PdM: Our work covers an extremely broad spectrum. The VitraHaus

(‒) is at one end of the spectrum. There we monitored and controlled everything down to the tiniest detail; if mistakes have been made, we bear sole responsibility for them. The other end of the spectrum is exemplified by our urban projects in China: we submit an idea, a proposal, a preliminary project, which is carried out by others. At best, the project is implemented by a local architect, with on-site support from one of our teams in the course of development and construction. The latter situation is challenging because we want to find out whether we can work like that, not just at a geographical and cultural remove but also at a physical distance. Some of our colleagues have chosen to concentrate exclusively on projects in which they alone are in control, as we were at Vitra. However, we feel this is too constricting because we want to extend the radius of our activities and the range of our experience. To return to the projects in China, in the case of Qingdao, our concept was unfortunately taken over by the client and given to an unknown Chinese architecture firm without our knowledge and approval. Currently the firm is also seeking to strike a balance between the need for freedom and the improvisational potential of artistic activities, on one hand, and the operating constraints of a company that must meet production standards, on the other. The response varies according to project; there are neither rules nor recipes. Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron feel that architecture is a manner of handling uncertainties and



  :    oftentimes chaotic realities; they have avoided adopting a position of a priori control; they do not start with answers. They have rather adapted to an industrial production scale while trying to preserve the “artisanal” dimension of their first projects. The number of projects has steadily increased over the past twenty years, allowing for large-scale interventions, both metropolitan and regional; financial success has also given them leeway to take on difficult, low-return, or even loss-making projects. This has also made it possible to absorb the difficulties encountered during the construction of the Elbphilharmonie. In Brazil, the gymnasium built in a Natal favela formed part of a solidarity project undertaken p. ,  in collaboration with residents, a social center, municipal authorities, a university, and a foundation. The project’s originality as part of a reflection on the conditions of programmatic invention has proven greatly beneficial to the firm. And the teaching work of the firm’s founders keeps them connected with an anthropological approach to architecture.

3.

  :   

Jacques Herzog often recalls that the success of the firm’s projects has benefited from good partners, that is, a relationship of trust with the client. He mentions VitraHaus (their client, Rolf Fehlbaum, trusted them implicitly), the commissions from Miuccia Prada, the Tate Modern (with Nicholas Serota), the Dominus Winery (Christian and Cherise Moueix), the Schaulager (Maja Oeri), Actelion (Jean-Paul Clozel), as well as numerous projects for Ricola and Roche. Based in the metropolitan area of Basel, the latter projects benefited from regular personal exchange with the directors of enterprises that have retained a family nucleus. The advantage of such an approach applies not only to Herzog & de Meuron but to any architectural office that fosters innovation and experimental craftsmanship as a complement to necessarily standardized processes and products. Nonetheless, the client’s personal engagement is still a luxury, and Herzog & de Meuron wisely refrains from dogmatically treating it as a must.

p.  p.  p. ,  ⁄ p.  p. , - ⁄ p. , -, -, -, -, -, 

Zero risk and the ideal of unconditional freedom based on absolute agreement between client and architect are asocial fictions. In the history of architecture, the dream of the ideal client typically involves the narcissism of mutual mirroring between art and power. The cult of creative artistic genius is associated with an image of the artist that does not sit well with the latter eighteenth-century idea of art for the public.



 ⁄  The notion that art should not be made for a specific community, an institution, or indeed a single patron but rather for the undefined public at large is an invention of the Enlightenment. It is not, however, incompatible with the idea of artistic activity as research, experimentation, or laboratory work. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the dealer of Braque and Picasso, for example, was convinced that the works of these two artists, first available only to a “happy few,” would transform the prevailing culture and were thus of significance to the public at large. This philosophy is reflected, to a certain extent, in the strategic approach taken by Herzog & de Meuron. Obviously every architectural project is subject to the constraints of the remit, and these must be taken into account. But Kahnweiler’s liberal approach ties in with a progressive vision of design (and of the project) that couples formal innovation with an intervention in the norms and standards of the culture (and of work). In the s, postmodern architects often dreamed of restoring the status once accorded to the architectural discipline in the manner that was formalized within the fine arts system, a status equivalent to that of painting and sculpture. Herzog and de Meuron kept their distance from the academic revival of this idea. They believe that architecture needs enlightened patrons not only to survive the wheeling-and-dealing trivialization of construction but also to escape being caught in the maelstrom of high-end standards. However, the ideal of the enlightened patron not only contradicts the idea of art for the public but also the principle of architecture for all. In s Germany, activists championed social architecture that guaranteed the basic amenities, an Existenzminimum, as it was called. The expression is still poorly understood today. The idea was founded upon an ethical approach to building that sought a basic level of comfort for all, in contrast to the exaggerated, sophisticated amenities of a privileged minority. Hygiene was a crucial feature. The principle of rationally organized housing arose from the necessity of optimizing domestic space to ensure a maximum quality of life for everyone at the lowest possible cost. Rampant criticism of the ideal of puritan ergonomics modeled on the rationalization of industrial work focused on theoretical concepts, instead of analyzing buildings. In contrast, Herzog and de Meuron have thoroughly studied the settlements built in Basel and the model homes p. , - designed by Hans Schmidt and Paul Artaria. The ideal of good architecture for all has underpinned the experiments with social housing, which Herzog & de Meuron has been unable to pursue for various reasons, ever since the Rue des Suisses project in Paris at



  the end of the s. In particular, it was not possible to reconcile the firm’s guidelines with the construction, financial, and technical standards of social housing. However, the following, main section of this book clearly shows how interest in the rationalized forms of common housing has impacted the history of Herzog & de Meuron. Precise and detailed attention to the basic components of construction has always been a priority. These components are elements, in the twentieth-century constructivist sense of the term. As such, they cut across the academically defined hierarchical categories of architecture; they apply to all building types and do not exclude standardized single-family lodgings. Herzog and de Meuron can hardly be suspected of demagoguery in their social approach to architecture. Nevertheless, they were interested in implementing quality standards for popular housing. In fact, through their continuing interest in the house as a primary or fundamental form of habitat, they have, in their own way, reaffirmed a “modernist” tradition without joining certain postmodern ideologues in recurring to a premodern “art of building.” The principle of a variety of materials—what John Ruskin described as “truth to materials”—indicates a traditionalist doctrine, hostile to artifice. Herzog and de Meuron do not subscribe to this doctrine, but through meticulous observation of constructive elements they have devised their own ergonomic discipline, which is no doubt indebted to the pioneers of social housing.

4.

 

Rare among high-profile architects, Herzog and de Meuron appreciate the vernacular, the local, and its potential for technological research. But instead of clinging to traditional values, they profit from this understanding as a valuable source of experimentation. The debate on values, a reactionary cultural and political response to the uncertainties of globalization, is not an issue for Herzog & de Meuron, as one of the most outstanding and respectable players in globalized architecture. Pragmatic and down to earth, the office operates on the basis of some fairly simple principles without theoretical embellishment. The prerequisite of every project is the analysis of “context” and, above all, in-depth study of even the most immaterial elements of the program (the psychology of the client, in particular), and also of the territorial data beyond the actual site of the project. This permits intervention in practically any situation, and yet avoids a situation whereby the progressive application of typological elements and a particular syntax develops into a one-size-fits-all formula.



Social housing on Rue des Suisses, Paris (competition , project ‒, realization ‒): facade onto Rue des Suisses and view of the inner courtyard, September  []



  The development of the firm can be compared to that of Ricola, a company that also exports expertise based on local resources (the analogy is also one explanation for the success—in every area across the board, including communications—of the buildings designed for this firm). The gabion structure of locally sourced stones for the Dominus Winery is another example of vernacular invention. The idea that the construction materials contribute to inscribing a building into its environment has been implemented on several occasions, particularly in the Basel region, with the Schaulager (‒) and, more recently, Ricola’s Kräuter- p. , - p. - zentrum (‒). As Pierre de Meuron points out, the design of the latter building reflects Ricola’s specific métier, instead of perpetuating the (poor) principles that typically determine the design of industrial buildings. PdM: The way in which herbs are processed is similar to that of wine: a natural product undergoes a linear sequence of transformations. The herbs are delivered by the farmers, pass through quarantine, go through various stages of drying, and are finally packaged in bags. Mixtures are made according to different recipes and then put in storage again. Everything is automated and the process only requires five employees. Engineers don’t think holistically; they think in terms of a linear sequence of machines and functions, a kind of concretized diagram. The result is an amorphous, built monster. In contrast, we proposed a simple shape—a right-angled prism. We stood firm and managed to convince both client and users. A simple structure with large neutral volumes is the core of an industrial building. Twenty or fifty years later it can be vacated and repurposed. The agricultural and local importance of Ricola’s production worked in our favor. We knew that it was going to be an industrial building of substantial size. We decided to use earth, more precisely rammed earth, for the outer shell of the building. We had already studied the production of that material for other applications but had so far not found a project that fully justified its use. Like concrete, rammed earth is a combination of various binders and natural additives, which were sourced, in this case, from quarries as well as clay and gravel pits, all located within a fifteen-mile radius. The blocks of rammed earth for the facade were then prefabricated on site, enabling us to save considerably on the cost of transportation. The physical qualities of rammed earth are very interesting, in particular its thermic inertia, which equalizes the building’s inside and outside temperatures and therefore reduces the need for additional air-conditioning. Power is largely supplied by solar panels on the roof. The additional expense for the facade, amounting to some five percent of the overall budget,



Schaulager, Laurenz Foundation, Basel/Münchenstein, Canton of Basel-Landschaft (project ‒, realization ‒), September  []. : Main entrance on Ruchfeldstrasse; : Detail showing the concrete wall and a door of woven wire mesh



  was accepted by the client in view of the obvious qualitative and quantitative advantages. The similarity with the construction process of the Schaulager is obvious. The walls are visible both inside and out. The porous impression recalls the gabions of the Moueix winery. To a certain extent this constructive approach also applies to the planning and development of the cultural facilities for Santa Cruz de Tenerife (built between  and ) and the design for the City of Flamenco in Jerez (which has been on hold since ). In these diverse situations, the geographical inscription, starting with the geological data, has been very pronounced. For an urban-scale intervention in Jinhua, China (the planning of a new residential district on rice fields on the outskirts of the city), Herzog & de Meuron proposed reviving a local technique, namely brick construction. However, before building the gymnasium for the Mãe Luíza favela of Natal, the firm had never explicitly targeted self-build or recycling methods (with the exception of the workshops held with students of the ETH Studio Basel in Cairo, Casablanca, Damascus, Beirut, Belo Horizonte, and Calcutta). These are of particular interest today among architects working in peripheral regions of the world economy, in so-called developing countries.

5.

p. 

p. -, 

p. , 

 

Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron are wary of “representation” and symbolism. They cultivate clarity and simplicity of form, devoid of compositional effects but with a complex structure. They admire the way in which Joseph Beuys dramatized materials, but they also take inspiration from minimalist art, in particular the work of Donald Judd as seen by Rémy Zaugg. This discrepancy has seminally influenced their development. They are indebted to Zaugg for escaping the pitfall of glorifying the supposedly impersonal nature of “minimalism” as a form of hypermodern (or infra-modern!) geometric simplicity. Their distrust of dogma has enabled them to overcome the puritanical norm with which, as residents of Basel, they were inevitably involved. For Herzog and de Meuron, a modern form need not necessarily be purist, need not necessarily waive all pathos and psychological resonance.

p. -

We have often discussed the psychological component. The perceptual experience generated by the object has always interested these two architects as much or more than the form itself, which is all too often



: TEA, Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands (project ‒, realization ‒)

: Arena do Morro, center for sports, leisure and cultural activities, Mãe Luíza, Natal, Brazil (project ‒, realization ‒)



  reduced to a geometry without substance. Since the analyses of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception (), widely read and cited by artists and theoreticians of minimalist art, the cube has become a kind of ideal form analogous to the circle of theological literature. For Herzog and de Meuron, one geometric figure is not superior to another. They do not cherish the dream of imposing a mathematical order on the physical world. Remember that Galileo also refused to define a hierarchy of geometric figures (even though he felt obliged to favor the circle). For them, the cube is not so much a figure as a form that corresponds to a cutout, a volume, or possible mobility (the die). In fact, the cube is a module of perception even more than being a typological architectural form that corresponds to the idea of a pure geometric volume. Rémy Zaugg’s description of the alignment of Donald Judd’s six cubes displayed in the Kunstmuseum Basel was for them an antidote to the so-called purism of architects struggling for the sublime.1 Zaugg emphasized the constructive rigor of the metal boxes: “The work, from the outset, evokes manufactured products rather than a sculpture. Boxes built in the manner of vulgar steel plates simply welded to each other are unusual in art. Neither the material nor the mode of construction lend these objects the allure of a work of art. Their character is not that of a sculpture, but that of industrial metallurgic products. [...] The work, which evokes serially manufactured objects, also makes one think of prefabricated building elements. The cube-shaped objects therefore not only reference every arbitrary serial object, they also resemble certain building elements. They could be the link in a process whose end point—for example, a bridge, a building, or a factory—alone would count. This lends them a character of intermediate products [my italics], of something suspended, provisional, or unfinished, with which everything remains to be done and also can be done.”2 Obviously, architecture can hardly make this aspect perceptible. The architect is obliged to deliver a finished product, and Herzog & de Meuron is renowned precisely for the care devoted to its technical services as well as the “finish” of most of its creations. The notion of an “intermediate product” is incompatible with their work. However, Judd’s series as described by Zaugg does lead to an idea of process that contradicts the idea of an isolated work-object. Since the early s, this idea has often been advanced in contemporary art with a demonstrative, indeed illustrative verve, almost like a fetish. And for architects this represents the reality of the conceptual trial-and-error (bricolage?) approach that characterizes the development of a project. There is a risk



 ⁄  of producing a mannerist equivalent of intermediate forms in juxtaposing “high-tech” contours with materials considered “poor” or vernacular, or otherwise picked from some catalogue of standardized industrial products. This mannerism is common in contemporary architecture. For architects like Herzog and de Meuron, the completed form is the result of a series of adjustments or approximations that must remain perceivable in the final result, not ostentatiously so but with characteristic subtlety: the “processual” dynamic of Judd’s cubes is part of the experimental approach that is a feature of their projects as a totality (and not of this or that project taken separately).

6.

    

There was a time when artists, in the United States as elsewhere, produced objects that were neither painting nor sculpture; these objects, qualified by Donald Judd as “specific” (), were situated at the intersection of assemblage, pop imagery, and a geometry liberated—for better or worse—from the utopian ambitions of European modernism. And they were not necessarily “abstract.” They often had figurative content. They were not representations of the body but rather their equivalents, in that they explored the constitutive connections between the organism and the image of the body: the division and interaction of exterior and interior, the sensitivity of the surface like taut skin, the tension between (functional) totality and more or less disassociated fragments, etc. In Europe, Herzog and de Meuron created an analogous situation, for themselves, for their own use, without seeking counterparts within contemporary architectural production. Their experiments with cubes and boxes led to redefining the facade as a surface that penetrates the volume, with different effects of depth and lighting (through color), of hollowing out and transparency. Their current research, in particular on materials, ties in with inquiry into the image of the body, as psychoanalytically interpreted ever since Paul Schilder published The Image and Appearance of the Human Body.3 For centuries, Western art has been based on a mode of representation that links the model of nature with the structure of the human body as an ideal of beauty and a paradigm of proportion. Being incorporated into the fine arts, architecture was theorized and put into practice as a discourse (or a form of language). Herzog and de Meuron have assimilated the failure of this system; Jacques Herzog is indeed at times quite critical of architects’ theoretical texts and manifestos. Nonetheless, Herzog



     and de Meuron tirelessly implement the two foundational parameters of the fine arts—body and nature—with an approach to technological research based on the latest advances in biochemistry and biogenetics. REHAB Basel (‒), a rehabilitation center for spinal cord and brain p.  injuries on the outskirts of the city, and the Laban Centre (‒), a p.  dance academy in the London suburbs, among other projects, are places designed for the human body. The Laban Centre is the realization of a program designed for the exercise and movement of the body. In both cases light is a crucial factor, and the volumes are conceived as extensions of a mobility to be recovered or trained. At the Laban Centre, the semi-reflecting windows of the cafeteria correlate with the porosity of the body’s surface: they relate the building to its environment just as the body relates to its surroundings. The reference to Dan Graham’s pavilions testifies to the psychic dimension of the architectural apparatus. It’s not just a question of amenities; the pleasure of comfort is accompanied by a feeling of strangeness, a disruption of spatial bearings. The resulting sense of strangeness is crucial to learning or rather relearning to relate to the world unselfconsciously. JH: The patients referred to REHAB have seen their world and their physical space shrink dramatically in a single instant. We tried to understand and imagine what it is like to experience such a sudden and extreme restriction of movement. The transparent globes are like skylights illuminating the rooms from above. Through the interplay of their light reflections, we have attempted to concentrate the world and nature within a very small space. It is like architectural LSD! The building plays the role of an instrument that restores a certain amount of movement and freedom, enabling patients to breathe, to see, to move, to rediscover the world, and ultimately to regain some independence. This reveals an archaic aspect of architecture. Dieter Koepplin used the term “prostheses” in reference to the work of Beuys. The architecture of REHAB has indeed implemented the therapeutic potential of art in the spirit of Beuys. The image of the prosthesis is, however, debatable. A prosthesis compensates a physical deficit; it modifies the body. At REHAB, even more than at the Laban Centre, the lighting, the surroundings, and the way they breathe are vital factors of the architecture. The architecture quintessentially demonstrates that both program and context are by definition specific. Architecture must absorb the full potential of the site. The concentration breathes because the immediate surroundings have been absorbed and transformed into an “ambiance” favorable to recuperation and physiological “rehabilitation.”



Laban Dance Centre, London (competition , project ‒, realization ‒)



     The elements that generate this atmosphere are not organic substitutes. They do not add to the anatomical structure because they are not of the same nature, but they do intervene in the metabolic relationship of the body to its environment. The forms are created by physiologically and psychophysiologically interpreting the environment. In the (evolving) system of the fine arts that continued from the Renaissance until the second half of the nineteenth century, anatomy played an essential scientific supporting role, as did optics (and perspective). The nineteenth century then saw a milestone in experimental medicine when Claude Bernard’s study of the milieu intérieur, the “inner environment” of the body, introduced another parameter of observation. The author of the introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine () was paying homage to the great Swiss scientist Albrecht von Haller (‒) when he stated, “Anatomy is the basis necessary to all medical investigation, whether theoretical or practical.” But he goes on to say: “The whole humoral or physico-chemical side of physiology, which cannot be approached by dissection and which treats of what we call our inner environment, was neglected. The reproach which I am making here against anatomists who wished to subordinate physiology to their point of view, I make in the same way against chemists and physicists who wish to do the same thing. […] In a word, I consider that the most complex of all sciences, physiology, cannot be completely explained by anatomy. To physiology, anatomy is only an auxiliary science.”4 Claude Bernard then classified physiology as a “biological science,” distinguishing it from zoology and comparative anatomy, which do research into living organisms in order to determine the “morphological laws of their evolution and their transformation.” Physiology does not classify forms: “Physiologists take a quite different point of view: they deal with just one thing, the properties of living matter and the mechanism of life, in whatever way it shows itself [my italics]. For them, genus, species and class no longer exist. There are only living beings; and if they choose one of them for study, that is usually for convenience in experimentation.”5 Physiology therefore links the study of the mechanics of a living being with that of the “inner environment” of the human body. It would be interesting to compare two past periods in the production of Herzog & de Meuron in terms of scientific models, keeping in mind as a point of reference the image of the body that, in the visual arts since Cézanne, has been closely linked to the pictorial interpretation of sensations.



Swimming pool at REHAB, Centre for Spinal Cord and Brain Injuries, Basel (competition , project ‒, realization ‒), July  []



     Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron emphasize their enduring indebtedness to Rémy Zaugg for his insistent focus on perception and his testamentary work, the Esquisses perceptives (Perceptive Sketches), dedicated to analyzing a painting by Paul Cézanne, La Maison du Pendu (The House of the Hanged Man). Their interest, morphologically speaking, in architecture as generating objects, was initially inspired by their studies with Aldo Rossi, although they were more influenced by the methods of the architect-theorist/teacher than by his projects. Zaugg had essentially taught them how to think about pictures (tableaux). A tableau is not a painted image; it is a field of practice for an activity that implicates the entire body. For Rémy Zaugg, interpreter of Cézanne, the picture is an equivalent of the world, not because it could be a complete program of mimetic representation but because it absorbs all sensations, becoming the sensitive, perceiving subject. In Cézanne’s work, there is no program but rather an experience and a subject inscribed in the painting. In the project for Roche p. - conducted in collaboration with Zaugg, the first wall in the entrance to the building contains the phrase: “Ich, das Bild, ich fühle…” (I, the picture, I feel). The picture is the subject. It feels and it speaks. Yet this language is not the language of architecture. A building can constitute a pictorial (or picturesque) motif; it can be designed according to a centripetal movement and actually seem to turn in on itself, detached from its environment. But architecture cannot claim the autonomy of the picture. JH (): What counts for us is the density of sensual perception contained within a picture, which is revealed to viewers when they in turn perceive it. “Life” is actually expressed in forms of perception. Rémy Zaugg made a distinction between artistic perception and other modes of perception, especially in everyday life. This life energy—creativity, vitality, call it what you will—is richer and more intense in a work of art than it is in, say, advertising, whose clear-cut, single-minded goals channel the viewer’s perception rather than broadening it. In the s, several of the firm’s projects dealt with the facade as a materialized image, that is, as a layered and ornamented surface, a skin. At the time, in a departure from the tradition of Pop Art, artists in Germany had begun investigating the image as object, particularly in Düsseldorf (the city of Beuys and Bernd and Hilla Becher). Herzog and de Meuron also subscribed to these ideas, represented by such artists as Thomas Schütte and Reinhard Mucha. Peter Blum Gallery in New York published a book on the subject in , Architectures of Herzog & de Meuron: Portraits by Thomas Ruff.



: Goetz Collection, Gallery for a Private Collection of Modern Art, Munich (project ‒, realization ‒) : Section through the gallery space partially set into the ground (sketch by Jacques Herzog)



       The building for the Goetz Collection (Munich, ‒) was the pivotal project of the late s. Gerhard Mack has summarized its impact on spatial perception: “Because building regulations for the residential area restricted the height and footprint of the building, a basement level was added to provide the required exhibition space. Herzog & de Meuron took advantage of this restriction, making it the basis of their design. The first step was to scrap the traditional solution of relegating video art and drawings to the basement, and to aim instead at achieving equal spatial quality on both exhibition levels. The conventional hierarchy of rooms has been inverted. Experiments with traditional overhead lighting, as seen in the early sketches, were soon abandoned, and the main, usually top-lit exhibition hall, which is the focus of many institutions, was placed in the basement. In the upper story there are three smaller galleries. The  to .-meter-high walls of the rooms are unfinished plaster, and at the top is a strip of matt glazing which ensures even, glare-free light so that visitors are no longer sure which floor they are on.”6 The translucent glass building, nestled in a green space, is an object of great precision. At once simple and bewildering, it was and remains a rare accomplishment of an object as architecture at variance with the high-tech trends and postmodern mannerisms of the time, instead reminiscent of the pavilions and other “follies” of the Ancien Régime. Munich was, in fact, a foremost representative of this tradition (the firm subsequently completed two other projects there, including the Allianz Arena). Dan Graham’s Pavilions (begun in ) resonate in several of the firm’s projects and the artist himself has made reference to François de Cuvilliés’ Rococo decorations for the salon of Amalienburg, a small hunting lodge built in  on the grounds of Nymphenburg Castle.

7.

      

The Laban Centre is the epitome of an architecture based on territorial p.  intimacy. With its appearance as a decorated shed—though without the signal effects of pop architecture—and the “technical” nature of the building materials, the structure is well adapted to the surrounding buildings in an area on the outskirts of the city with canals and no elevations except for a scattering of industrial buildings and a railroad bridge. The bright bands of color both subtle and vivid (lime green, magenta, and turquoise) lend an almost airy, luminous vibration, both near and far, to the polycarbonate envelope. Inside, the neo-Brutalist



De Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco (competition , project ‒, realization ‒)



       concrete stairs become a firmly grounded anchor of vertical circulation, while the overall space, a flowing combination of sloping surfaces, is punctured by recesses starting from the roof and cutting through the entire height of the building. These ambiguous, contrasting elements relate to the features of the location. If there is an idealization of existing conditions, then it is by concentrating the diffuse characteristics of the environs. This concentration is enhanced by the pull between introversion and the way in which the building animates its surroundings. While asserting its autonomy, the Laban Centre has reinvented a practically abandoned tract of land. More recent projects testify to the architects’ interest in the territorial definition of a building. They seek to highlight the psychological substance of the geography by confronting users, residents, viewers, and visitors with stimulating perceptive experiences. Museums are, of course, ideal fountainheads for this type of research. The similarities between the Schaulager and the de Young Museum (‒) result p. , - less from variations on syntax than from the deliberate relationship of the appearance of the building from afar to the experience of programmatic complexity. The de Young’s tower stands out from the trees of Golden Gate Park. Approaching the museum on foot through the park is, moreover, ideal preparation for a visit: one can experience the architecturally designed landscape in the spirit of Frederick Law Olmsted (the main architect of Manhattan’s Central Park). JH: We felt the monumentality achieved by the tower was very important to underscore the socio-cultural and urban role of the institution as a landmark on the borderline between the city and Golden Gate Park. In a prolonged and very lively debate, Pierre energetically defended the tower. We told the client that, thanks to the tower of the old building, the museum had become a symbol of the city. But for us, it was much simpler than that—the building would have been invisible without some part of it emerging from behind the trees. The museum would have been architecture only from within. The tower is not only a striking element seen from outside; from inside, it is like a tall window that affords a new and entirely unexpected view of the city. The Schaulager in Basel instantly stands out from the warehouses that p. , - dot its industrial surroundings but without making the spectacular, hightech statement that often characterizes cultural institutions located in industrial neighborhoods of varying density. Conceived as an accessible storehouse for a collection of contemporary art, the Schaulager is neither a museum nor a conventional art center; it is a new type of institution



 ⁄  O that resembles the surrounding warehouses. Its very name, Schaulager, emphasizes the idea of a depot, a storeroom. Herzog & de Meuron had already worked on warehouses and museums (or exhibition venues) before. The specifications of this new program allowed the architects to combine both typologies. In its overall appearance, the building seems literally to rise up out of the ground, like a vertical landscape, the earth excavated from the site providing material for the concrete used in its construction. This echoes the use of locally sourced materials in the construction of the Dominus Winery. The indentation of the monumental entrance, facing the street, appears to be hollowed out of the block. Fronted by a small house as an “avant-corps” that is both an anchor for the building and a detached threshold for the visitor, the monumental entrance opens onto the interior atrium, which extends the full height of the Schaulager. Once again, as a logical consequence of the program, the perspective has been reversed: the galleries occupy the ground floor and the basement, while the holdings of the collection, for which the Schaulager was built to begin with, are housed in storage spaces on the upper floors. This break with conventional museum layouts produces an unprecedented effect; it is the antithesis of the ramp winding its way through the Guggenheim in New York: the upper levels of this voluminous interior are not gallery spaces more or less opening onto a central void; visitors see only a regular and vertiginous stack of passageways impenetrable to the gaze and evenly illuminated by dazzlingly bright neon lighting. In the secular and functional approach that currently prevails, the commemorative nature of the monument and its sacred implications have been sidelined. It is essentially an exceptionally large edifice, an urban or territorial landmark, of a certain grandeur that distinguishes it from ordinary architecture and the surrounding buildings (unless it is located in a peri-urban no-man’s-land). And it is of an aesthetic rather than spiritual grandeur. The Gothic cathedral was built in the heart of the medieval town, in close proximity to dwellings, from which it stood out as the symbol of God incarnate. It also signaled the city emerging in the landscape. The infrastructure of the modern city designed for the motorized masses requires vast open spaces for development. The scale of mobility, which corresponds to the perception of the building from an urban highway, has replaced the scale of the monument built in the heart of a city. The stadium in Munich is exemplary in this respect. First seen from the highway, it is a signal of the city and, above all, an early indication of the urban fabric. Rather than rising up into the sky, it seems to float there,



() like a bubble; at night, it projects its colors and illuminates the sky, which is transformed into a colossal dome when seen from inside. This stadium is not a bombastic machine for the sporting masses. Its spectacular dimensions fold into an interior suggesting a crater open to the sky. Following the curved perimeter, the envelope of the building is a continuous, undulating layer of thermoplastic resin (ETFE) air cushions. The overall form was intended to produce a streamlining effect on the outside and to move the spectators as close as possible to the playing field. In addition, the program required a flexible organization of the building. To maximize cost-effectiveness, the stadium has to be able to accommodate diverse audiences, for instance, and to offer spaces that can be used not just for sports but for other events as well. The convex roof of the parking lot (for over , cars) extends the building’s visual reach and adds a horizontal dimension to its undulating curves.

8.

ornament(s)

In , over the course of a first series of conversations with Jacques Herzog, two words, two questions came up again and again: ornamentation and the sacred. I mentioned Henri Matisse and Adolf Loos. We had talked earlier of the example of the picture (tableau), the work of the painter Rémy Zaugg, and the projects on which the firm had collaborated with him. The following is a pivotal moment in our exchange: JFC: Ornamentation is expansive; it overflows boundaries. Like grass, it spreads outward, it does not want to be restricted, and it gets everywhere. Ornamentation is barbarous. The great cultures of ornamentation are barbarian cultures, and Islam. JH: Islamic architecture uses ornament to mask bare surfaces. For Muslims, the divine is revealed in bare surfaces and so they should be chastely clad by being decorated. In Catholic and Orthodox cultures, painted and decorated surfaces—often with iconographic imagery—convey spiritual and religious messages. Having been born into a Protestant culture, I have always admired the Russian and Greek Orthodox use of image and decoration. Later, as architects, we discovered the potential of ornament as a means of destroying “valid” form. We started embellishing surfaces when we found ourselves faced with the difficulty of declaring, in reference to a specific project, “That’s the form I want, no doubt about it.” Ornament has often helped us solve this problem. When we discovered Arab architecture, we soon realized that ornament is a means of suppressing form. Ornament plays with ambiguity and doubt.



 ⁄  A link was thus established between the use of ornament and a sense of the sacred. We think of the polemical position of Adolf Loos, which condenses and amplifies the puritanical approach of anti-ornamental austerity. The author of Ornament and Crime () opposed art that aligned with the sacred to the bourgeois ornamentation of everyday life. But he does not condemn ornament as such. He vilifies ornamentation that is eclectic, profane, bourgeois, gemütlich… His conception is dandyistic, aristocratic, antibourgeois, without being revolutionary. He wants to restore the link between ornament, the sacred, and nature. In the spirit of Loos, one could argue that ornamentation is distinct from decoration, in the bourgeois meaning of the term, as a result of rupture analogous to the intrusion of the sacred into secular life. Jacques Herzog challenges this twofold division. He does not despise decoration, and he rejects setting the nobility of the sacred against the vulgarity of the profane. Ornament, he says, can be integrated into the structure and contribute to the elaboration of architectural space. The integration of ornament into the structure refers to the living surface, thought of as analogous to skin. JH: Our first commissions did not yet permit us to question the program and make it part of the architectural design along with the structure, the interior space, and the “ornament.” But we have always tried, in one way or another, to establish a relationship between space and skin. At the p. - beginning, we were less concerned with structure. In the case of the Ricola Storage Building, there is a structural analogy between the visible stratification of the rock and the building’s facade. Other projects, like Prada in Tokyo, the Beijing Stadium, or the City of Flamenco in Jerez, embody the idea that the skin is a unifying factor and that it has depth. We have always aspired to such unity but only gradually, in the course of our work, did we encounter means of integrating the various components of a project. Without that unity, decoration is just stuck onto the architecture, like wallpaper. Ornament is therefore a possible means of overcoming the “problem of form.” Ultimately, what is generally considered a luxury, an additional skin added to the building structure, was and continues to be for Herzog & de Meuron the vector of a new sculptural and dynamic conception of architecture. The architects have occasionally been criticized for privileging surface and image, but their track record shows that their treatment of ornament forms part of a complex, overall sculptural conception and does not simply aspire to decorative exuberance. The decorated facade creates an image. The ostensibly outward-looking image might be



      an illusion, but, as Jacques Herzog explains, one that can be integrated into the complex set of relationships that define the architectural entity. JH: Oddly, a new feeling of freedom is generated when ornament and structure are united as one. Suddenly you no longer need to explain or apologize for this or that decorative detail: it is a structure, a space. Actually, I am not specifically interested in structure or ornament or space as such. Things start to get interesting when you bring all these elements together, experimenting with them and applying them to the building. We try to respond to simple, almost archaic questions and antitheses: up/down, open/closed, far/near, dark/light. In the end, we prefer not to talk in terms of ornament, structure, or space. Those are technical terms that we have learned but we don’t attach any value to them. When you integrate them into a whole, they no longer play a particularly big role.

9.

     

Since the Tate project, Herzog & de Meuron has significantly expanded its operations. The activity and performance of the firm naturally deal with monumental and urban aspects of architecture, but always within the continuity of previous research. This continuity is based largely on an enduring reference to nature as a model, which certainly doesn’t belong to the canon of contemporary architecture. Herzog and de Meuron are distrustful of pastoral conservatism, but they have not forgotten the example of Joseph Beuys, with whom they had the opportunity to work at the beginning of their career, in , on the Feuerstätte II installation. They clearly factor in the ecological dimension, particularly in their thinking on the phenomenon of metropolitanization, which they have studied at length with respect to Basel.

p. 

p. - p. -, -

Their interest in ecology cannot be reduced to a careful consideration of building materials or the environmental context of their work. It is expressed primarily in their focus on perception that addresses all of the senses in opposition to the invasive, shallow triviality of design and the facile exploitation of advertising-style images. For Jacques Herzog, “all of the senses” significantly includes the sense of smell, which is as diffuse and subtle as it is penetrating and uncontrollable, evoking elusive memories in contrast to the conscious act of remembering and recollecting. The two warehouses built for Ricola in the early s demonstrate that p. - the monumental can constitute a sort of second nature by lending the



Ricola Europe, production and storage building, Mulhouse-Brunstatt (project , realization )



      rigor of industrial architecture a physiognomy and depth akin to natural forms. The two buildings embody a principle that often informs the work of Herzog & de Meuron: the ornamental integration of nature with technical (functional) rationality. The light-permeable walls of the Mulhouse warehouse feature a decorative motif from a photo by Karl Blossfeldt, exemplifying the speculations, since the late nineteenth century, on the relationship between natural formations and ornamental fantasy. It is telling that the weighty and monumental canopy flanking the building in Mulhouse can also be found in the de Young in San Francisco. The rainwater that has “painted” the concrete end walls of the warehouse over the years was also incorporated into the design of Rémy Zaugg’s studio (also in Mulhouse). The water that collects on the roof increases the thermal inertia of the building, and, as it overflows, leaves traces on the bare, windowless walls. Enlisting the help of natural processes typifies the work of this firm. Once the land is built up, lived on, urbanized, it expresses a twofold process: the landscape is increasingly engulfed by urban culture; but the city, in turn, is transformed into a landscape. Herein lies the key to the architectural philosophy of Herzog & de Meuron. The study Basel, A p. -, Nascent City?, conducted in the early s, was instrumental. After hav- , - ing worked for many years with the conventional form of the box (and the cube), followed by an emphasis on the largely horizontal dimension of architecture (numerous projects continue to address these two options), Herzog & de Meuron has recently focused on vertical monumental forms, in particular towers and high-rise buildings. Cases in point are the extension of the Tate building (prefigured by the de Young tower), the spectacular Roche tower in Basel, and the Triangle project in Paris. These projects, placed within the scale of an urbanized territory, require a geographical imaginary and a geographical imagination. In August , Jacques Herzog presented a building conceived as a landscape-sculpture that harmonizes with the powerful and impressive geological character of the island of Tenerife. JH (August ): The island of Tenerife looks as if it had been deliberately designed; it gives us an idea of the forces that formed the planet Earth. It is an ideal terrain, a lesson in the diversity of sculpture or the way in which it might evolve. There, the manifestation of nature is so extraordinary and singular that we had to think hard about how we could build on the island—how and what we could place on this “earth,” on ground that almost seems to be artificially created. The volcanic emergence of the island is a sculptural gesture of inexpressible violence. It seemed so utterly different to me from the landscape in Switzerland. Switzerland appears



Plaza de España, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands (competition , master plan ‒, project ‒, realization ‒)



      immutable; nothing ever seems to change, neither the landscape nor the laws nor the form of nature. In our neighboring countries, France and Germany, things are different; other, more formidable forces are at work: the form of the territory in those countries is not changed by geological but by political forces. Like Beuys, I believe that the processes of nature have an equivalent in society. The immensity of the oceans and the impact of volcanic eruptions open up new worlds for me. As a young architect, you tend to cling to certain materials, to certain forms and preferences. To discover that forms can emerge as if by themselves, on the basis of the laws of nature, is a seminal experience. Instead of natural forces, we work, by analogy, with a conceptual strategy that we apply to every project with the aim of allowing the architectural form to emerge by itself, as it were. This leads to a freedom and openness that permits us to reach out mentally in many different directions.

1

2

3

The work of Donald Judd was acquired by the Kunstmuseum Basel in : Untitled, ; coldrolled steel, six boxes of  ×  ×  cm each, lined up with  cm between each box. Rémy Zaugg, La Ruse de l’innocence. Chronique d’une sculpture perceptive,  (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, ), p.  and . Paul Schilder, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body: Studies in the Constructive Energies of the Psyche (London: Kegan Paul, ).

4

5 6

Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, trans. Henry Copley Green (New York: Dover Publications, ), pp. ‒; first published in French in  as Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale. Ibid., p. . Gerhard Mack, Herzog & de Meuron: The Complete Works, vol. : ‒ (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, ), p. .



The Making of an Urban Biography

The Kleinbasel district, seen from Building 1 under construction on the Roche Basel Site, June . In the foreground, the chimney of Building 97, Roche research and development facility; to the left, the Landhof, the buildings of the Messe, and in the background the Novartis Campus.

To the right, the Kunstgewerbeschule, the tracks of the German railway, the east-west/northsouth road hub, and in the background the harbor installations along the Rhine [] 

Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron were born in the district of Basel located on the right bank of the river Rhine known as Kleinbasel, or Lesser Basel. The name dates back to at least the thirteenth century and refers to the conurbation facing the historic heart of the city. A bridge was built in . Pierre de Meuron explains, “At the beginning of the thirteenth century, the construction of the Mittlere Brücke [literally the ‘middle bridge’ or ‘center bridge’] was decisive for the development of the city. At the time there were only two or three bridges on the Rhine. The north-south route followed the Rhine, crossed Basel, passed by Lucerne and then Flüelen [the harbor located at the end of Lake Lucerne], and was followed by the famous Devil’s Bridge [Teufelsbrücke], built several years later on the St. Gotthard Road. The Romans did not know of the Gotthard Pass. These two bridges—that which crosses the Rhine at Basel and that which opens a route across the Alps— allowed the development of trade between northern and southern Europe during the fourteenth century. Basel thus became an important center of commerce and banking. These two bridges also facilitated the founding of the Swiss Confederation at the end of the thirteenth century (). In , the territory of Kleinbasel was acquired from its landowner, the Bishop of Strasbourg, to form part of the commune of Basel. Today, the area is delimited by the Rhine to 

the south and west, and on the other side by a double threshold, the two north-south routes: the highway that connects Hamburg with Italy—fortunately underground here—and the railroad tracks. Beyond the tracks modern neighborhoods were built in the s.”



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13. Roche Building 1 (Herzog & de Meuron, ) 14. Garden suburb Im Vogelsang (Hans Bernoulli, ) 15. Schorenmatten housing development (Hans Schmidt, ‒)



When viewed as a trinational metropolitan area, Basel is bound by five rounded mountain hilltops [known as “Belchen” in German and “Ballon” in French], Ballon d’Alsace, Grand Ballon, and Petit Ballon to the northwest in the Vosges, the Black Forest Belchen to the northeast, and the Swiss Belchen at the southern foothills of the Jura. The Belchen System designates a theory developed in the 1980s by several scientists, in particular Rolf D’Aujourd’hui, the archaeologist of Basel Canton from 1982 to 1998. It is based on geographic, astronomic, and geometric observations. Etymologically, both the German word Belchen and the French Ballon are derived from the Celtic bhel, meaning bright, luminous, glowing, and radiant,

which also reappears in the name of the sun god, Belenus. The visual axes between three of the Belchen (BA, BB, SB) form a right triangle that can be interpreted as an astronomical reference system corresponding to the annual solar and lunar cycles. Established by the Celts around what was then an important settlement, it is now the center of trinational Metropolitan Basel. At the spring and autumn equinoxes, from the Ballon d’Alsace (BA) one can see the sun rise above the Black Forest Belchen (BB), from where one can see it set behind the Ballon d’Alsace. Orientation in time and space is a fundamental aspect of human existence in all civilizations. (P.d.M., February 2011)



St. Chrischona hill from Kleinbasel (from Building 1 under construction, Roche Basel Site), June  []



BA GB PB BB SB

Ballond’Alsace / Alsatian Belchen SSW GrandBallon / Great Belchen WSW PetitBallon / Little Belchen TNG BadischerBelchen / Black Forest Belchen SchweizerBelchen / Swiss Belchen

Sommersonnenwende / Summer solstice Wintersonnenwende / Winter solstice Tagundnachtgleiche / Equinox

ThelineoftheCelticroad,crossingtheoppidum(redzonemarkedO)ontheMinsterhill (Münsterhügel),runsalmostatrightanglestothesolaraxisatthesummersolstice(marked SSW).TheMinsterandthechapelsofSt.JohannandSt.Ulrich,oneachsideoftheMinster hill,arepositionedwithregardtothisaxis.ThesameaxesgovernthestreetlayoutofAugusta Raurica,theoldestRomantownontheUpperRhine,whichlies10kmtotheeastofBasel. TheancientroadthatcrossestheoppidumofBaselcontinuesthroughtheGallicsettlement (redzonemarkedK);itformedthebackboneoftheSt.Johannquarterinthelowertownand isthemainroadtoAlsace.ItrunsalmostparalleltothelinebetweentheSwissBelchen(SB) andtheLittleBelchen(PB)(seeplanonp.71).

Sketches by Pierre de Meuron, October . : Diagram of the Belchensystem, map of the Basel region; : The Belchensystem overlaid on the plan of central Basel





The city of Basel is surrounded by three hills, each topped by a chapel: St. Ottilia, on the Tüllinger, to the north of Riehen, on the German side; St. Chrischona to the east, at the German border; and St. Margarethen to the south, on the left bank of the Rhine. Three hills, three saints, three chapels. Like the Belchen System, they also establish visual connections between certain topographical and

cultural points in the city and the landscape. Until well into the nineteenth century, extremely small areas of habitation were scattered within a very large region, where the natural environs and features of a location exerted a much greater influence on the imagination than they do today. The three hills have now become popular recreational sites for walking and sledding. (P.d.M., February 2011)



: The hills of Tüllinger (left) and St. Chrischona (right) from the spire of the Basel Minster, May  [] : The Church of St. Margarethen, on Binningen hill, Canton of Basel-Landschaft, July  []



The hills of Tüllinger (bottom left) and St. Chrischona (bottom right) from the Church of St. Margarethen, March  []



Though little known and often underestimated, Basel-Landschaft is one of the most beautiful cantons in Switzerland. The photographs show two very different geological morphologies: the Table Jura, and the meeting of the Table Jura and the Folded Jura [see the drawing on the following doublepage]. They offer impressive, indeed fantastic evidence of the way in which geologic and hydrologic forces have impacted the shape of the landscape. Two types of settlements, mountain and valley villages, can be identified as well as the relationship between open land on the flatter plateaus and the steep wooded slopes. The scale shows how the city is embedded in the landscape and how it might be inscribed in the larger geographical

territory. At Studio Basel we tried to grasp, define, and develop the city not traditionally in terms of the city itself and its buildings, moving outward from the center, but rather in terms of the unbuilt environment. We studied the land and landscape of the Canton of Basel-Landschaft (nomen est omen) and the Birs, Egolz, and Wiese valleys. The method that we formulated for the metropolitan area of Basel has proved effective and compelling. We plan to be stringently consistent in applying that method in future. Switzerland is well suited to studies of this kind because it is the size of a handkerchief so that everything can be examined both microscopically and telescopically. (P.d.M., April 2015)



Landscape of the Canton of Basel-Landschaft, October  []



Sketch by Pierre de Meuron, dated  October, . Bottom left: “Table Jura: ‒ million years / Folded Jura: ~  million years (!) / ‘Horsts’ (H) / ‘Graben’ (G)”



The hall of the Grand Council, adjacent to the Basel Minster, June  []



The Hall of the Grand Council [17th ecumenical council of the Catholic Church, 1431–1449] is situated above the St. Nicholas Chapel next to the Basel Minster. It is not open to the public. Since I know the former pastor of the Minster, he occasionally gives me the key and therefore the opportunity to spend time in one of my favorite places in Basel. It is a hall where time has stood still, where you can see the benches on which the pope and the bishops sat in the first half of the fifteenth century. It was before the Reformation, a century before Luther, but the reformist tendencies were already strong. The Council had to deal with several issues: fighting the revolutionary reforms of the Hussite movement and establishing a reunion of faith between Rome and Constantinople, which was under constant Ottoman threat. Above all,

the Council laid claim to representing all of Christianity by the “grace of God,” as a result of which an antipope was elected, who successfully withstood the power of Rome for ten years. As the site of a Council—today it would be called a Congress City— Basel rose to prominence in the Christian world, leading to enduring economic and cultural prosperity. The flourishing papermaking and printing industries attracted such important artists as Konrad Witz, and a few years later, in 1460, the first university in Switzerland was founded in Basel. The history of the council hall is indeed impressive, but it is above all a place of incredible power, of direct, unfiltered access to an interior architecture that has remained unchanged for five centuries. (P.d.M., February 2011)



Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron studied with Also Rossi in Zurich. From him they learned to articulate urban geography and memory as well as psychology and morphology in their architectural projects. Rossi was interested in urban architecture, that is to say, the city as architecture. He identified “urban artifacts” that were as valuable as works of art. To go beyond the reductionist effects of functionalism, he looked for elements of permanence and continuity. In The Architecture of the City, he affirmed that “the city is something that persists through its transformations, and that the complex or simple transformations of functions that it gradually undergoes are moments in the reality of its structure.” This perspective led him to emphasize the monument as an enduring condensation of urban form. He distinguishes “historical or propelling permanence as a form of a past that we still experience and a pathological permanence as something that is isolated and aberrant.” Herzog and de Meuron learned to observe the historical depth of urban artifacts inscribed into a territory. Rossi referred to the concept of “collective memory” developed by Maurice Halbwachs, author of Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (; English: On Collective Memory). For Rossi, “memory becomes the guiding thread of the entire complex urban structure.” He even claimed that “memory is the consciousness of the city.” Rossi thought of the city as an “artifact” and a work of 

art, and he thus focused on the monument. But he also took into consideration the sociohistorical and political dimension of urban transformations, referring to a study by Halbwachs on the expropriations in Paris during the second half of the nineteenth century, as well as to the theory of the Basel architect Hans Bernoulli on the private ownership and parceling of land (Die Stadt und ihr Boden [The City and its Land], , ). Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron have transposed this realistic and confident treatment of the historical city to the case of Basel and to the current state of the urban phenomenon in general. For them, the architecturbanist is more a homeopath than a surgeon. Jacques Herzog recently said with respect to Basel, “Cities are similar and similar things are implemented. But we do not believe in the generic city. Each city has its own qualities and its own diseases, which make up the landscapes.” [Reference: Aldo Rossi, L’architettura della città, , ; The Architecture of the City, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, , pp. ‒, , , .]



: The courtyard of the Kunstmuseum Basel before  (architects Paul Bonatz and Rudolf Christ, ), postcard : The Erasmus House from Luftgässlein, September  []



1. Basel Minster – 2. East wall (archaeological remains) – 3. South wall and moat – 4. Antistitium (monastery, archaeological remains) – 5. Münsterberg  [Minster Hill] – 6. West wall (current remains) – 7. Wells – 8. Horreum (granary) – 9. Cellars, Augustinergasse – 10. Cellars, State archives – 11. Augustinergasse  – 12. Martinskirchplatz [St. Martin’s Church Square] (archaeological remains) – 13. Bridgehead – 14. Wall along Kellergässlein (current remains) – 15. Road network – 16. Cellars along Luftgässlein – 17. Cellars, Aeschen area – 18. Munimentum (fortification) Ancient Roads A. and B. Celtic and Roman era C. Late Roman Empire (th century)

For our architecture degree, in 1974, we conducted an in-depth historical study of the development of the city of Basel, from the earliest Gallic settlements in the first century BC to the modern day. We were studying under Aldo Rossi, and we put into practice his theory of the city, taking it at face value: we studied the form of the city taking into account the successive layers of its development. The analysis led to an intervention, an urban design project, on the Barfüsserplatz. The study is called “Architektonische Elemente der Stadtentwicklung Basels” (Architectural Elements in the Urban Development of Basel) and it was published in the city’s historical journal, the Basler Stadtbuch. We spent entire days in the archives, trying to go as far back as possible into the history of the parcels. Working with a detailed, mid-nineteenth-century surveyor’s

plan, we attempted two reconstructions of the parcels on the hill on which the cathedral is located, one at the end of the Roman Empire in the fourth century and the other at the beginning of the twelfth century. The monuments and the sparse groups of buildings and structures identified in archaeological excavations are marked in red on both maps. We tried to understand the growth and change of successive layers: the palimpsest of the city and the persistence of certain forms or lines that mark a continuity on the map of the city, such as the alignment of the cathedral or the diagonal street (Luftgässlein)—most likely dating from Roman times—where Erasmus’s house is located. A crucial factor throughout is the parcel, and therefore ownership; it determines how the “fabric” of the city was, and still is, woven through the centuries. 

A

B

C

Basel during the late Roman Empire (fourth century), map prepared by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron for their architecture degree project at ETH Zurich, 



Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, plan of the Barfüsserplatz development project prepared for their architecture degree at ETH Zurich, 



The importance of parceling was also taught by Rossi, who learned about it from the writings of the Basel architect Hans Bernoulli. We defined phases of development, representing each of them on a map that shows the parceling at a specific point in time: 1356 (earthquake in Basel), 1654 (bird’s-eye view by Matthäus Merian), 1862 (so-called Löffelplan), 1913 (prior to World War I), and 1974. The first transition is from the Roman city to the early medieval city. The latter can still be identified in the current morphology of the city center. Of course the buildings have undergone steady change: the plans of foundations and cellars show, for instance, that in the fourteenth century buildings were set back from the street; the spaces in front of them were only gradually built up in the course of time. In the second part of our thesis project, we concentrated on the area around Barfüsserplatz on the shore of the Birsig. At the edge of the city in Roman times, it was inside the early medieval city and is one of the centers of the historical city. In the nineteenth

century, it became the cultural heart of Basel; the Stadtcasino (event hall and concert hall), Kunsthalle, and municipal theater were public buildings for new uses, embodying the spirit of changing times. Our study of the city’s history led us to conclude that architectural changes made in the course of the twentieth century (especially the so-called amelioration of the city center in the 1930s) had clearly been a negative influence on the spatial quality of the lanes, streets, and squares; in particular, the relationship and definition between built and open spaces. Under the circumstances, we suggested closing off the Barfüsserplatz again by putting up two buildings (marked in red) on either side of the square and redefining it in relation to the church. The idea of relating the church to the square again was thus already a crucial concern forty years ago. The renovation and expansion of Stadtcasino has finally given us the opportunity to take the first concrete step in this direction. (P.d.M., April 2015)



Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Barfüsserplatz development project prepared for their architecture degree at ETH Zurich, . : Blind arcades on the north side of the square; : Facades on Steinenberg



Staircase of the Erasmus House, “Haus zum Luft” on Bäumleingasse, March  []



: Central staircase of the Kunstmuseum Basel (architects Paul Bonatz and Rudolf Christ, ), July  [] : Auguste Rodin, The Burghers of Calais (‒, bronze from /, purchased in ), in the courtyard of the Kunstmuseum Basel, postcard from 



The singularity of the Kunstmuseum Basel is a reflection of the city’s history. The museum houses the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, which was the first “public collection” in Europe. The nucleus of works preserved and presented today dates back to . With funding provided by the Municipal Council and the university, the city acquired the Kabinett of Bonifacius Amerbach (‒), expanded by his son Basilius (‒), both of whom were exponents of humanistic culture. Basilius Amerbach was a lawyer and university rector. The Kunstmuseum’s history developed in parallel to the bourgeois public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) founded upon European humanism, predating the ideology of the Enlightenment (which inspired nineteenth-century museums). The Amerbach Kabinett was opened to the public in , ten years after its acquisition, in a house in Old Basel called “zur Mücke,” near Münsterplatz [Minster Square]. In , the continuously expanding collection moved to its first purpose-built home, simply called “Museum.” This process resulted in  in the construction of a building for the Kunstmuseum. The monumental appearance of the building by Paul Bonatz and Rudolf Christ testifies to the rather anti-modernist approach of European architecture in the wake of the s. The history of the Kunstmuseum is inseparable from the sociological evolution of a patriotism that was at once bourgeois, 

municipal, and cosmopolitan, and which was intensified by the city’s industrial development. In , a circle of amateurs and patrons, the Kunstverein, was established to support local arts and culture; this society also initiated the Kunsthalle inaugurated thirty years later. The idea of defending modern art began in the late s under the direction of Georg Schmidt in response to the condemnation of “degenerate art” in Germany. The son of a father from Basel and a mother from Hamburg, Schmidt was also the brother of communist architect Hans Schmidt. Having made a name for himself for his socialist views and his work on behalf of refugees from the Nazi regime, Schmidt was appointed to the directorship of the museum in . Another determining factor in the development of the museum’s collections was the work of Maja Sacher-Stehlin with the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation, which she created in  in memory of her first husband, the son of the founder of the pharmaceutical company Hoffman-Laroche, known as Roche. The opening of the Schaulager in  inscribed this institutional network into the development of the agglomeration.



Photos of Joseph Beuys’s action Celtic + ~~~~, Basel, April , 

We have benefitted greatly from Basel’s interest in art. Such practitioners as Donald Judd and Joseph Beuys were an important presence in Basel at a very early stage. Although I had no artistic or art-historical training, I was deeply impressed and inspired by the work of contemporary artists that I saw in the museums. Artists express ideas through their work. Theoretical

constructs are worthless if the works cannot serve as a model of experience. It’s the same thing in architecture. I participated in Celtic + ~~~~, which Beuys presented in an air-raid shelter at the St. Jakob Stadium in Basel. We were fascinated by the work, especially the performative aspect, and of course by Beuys himself. (J.H., December 2008)





Photos of Joseph Beuys’s action with the “Alti Richtig” clique, Feuerstätte II [Hearth II], Basel Carnival,  : The work displayed within the collection of the Kunstmuseum Basel (gift of the artist and the “Alti Richtig” clique in )



For a number of years we designed costumes and masks for the Alti Richtig, one of the many groups or “cliques” of drummers and fife-players who walk the streets, making music during carnival. The costumes and masks traditionally caricature local and international personalities and political events. Such important artists as Jean Tinguely, a native of Basel, designed costumes for the carnival. In 1977, the Kunstmuseum acquired a large installation by Beuys titled Feuerstätte I [Hearth I]. Its purchase price, 300,000 Swiss francs, an enor-

mous sum at the time, sparked an outcry. We decided to address the controversy as a carnival theme, but instead of simply making fun we created a second sculpture with the intention of encouraging reconciliation between the artist and the public. Alemannic and Celtic traditions feature prominently in Beuys’s work and thought; we thought that the idea of participating in the carnival would appeal to him and that he would be able to explain the situation to advantage. That is exactly what happened. Our visit with him in Düsseldorf was an 

eye-opener and a seminal experience. We were twenty-six years old and still fascinated by Aldo Rossi; Beuys opened a new chapter in our lives. So far we had never been particularly interested in the north or in Germany, but we found that Beuys was very sensual, very intelligent and radical, like Rossi. We were enthralled by his aesthetics; his studio smelled of animal fat and there were enormous blocks of fat and pieces of copper on the floor. Encountering this artist was as formative as our university education. We worked out a carnival

theme, treating it like a design proposal. This led to a second installation by Beuys: Feuerstätte II [Hearth II], now in the holdings of Kunstmuseum Basel. The felt costumes that were manufactured are authorized replicas of a multiple by Beuys. It was his idea to lay out the copper and iron objects worn by the members of the clique during carnival on an oversized key ring to underscore the collective experience. He used materials symbolically, which was completely new to us. (J.H., December 2008)



Joseph Beuys, Haus (Filzplastik) [House (Felt Sculpture)], . Oil on paper, . × . cm. Nationalgalerie, Berlin



Blue House, Oberwil, Canton of Basel-Landschaft (project , realization –)

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House in Leymen, Alsace (project , realization ). : Sketch by Jacques Herzog. Handwritten note: “Roof identical to facade??!”;  : []



Schaudepot, Vitra Design Museum, Vitra Campus, Weil am Rhein, Germany, Basel agglomeration (project , realization –), April 



Lego House, ‒: Model (acrylic glass, screenprinted text, Lego pieces, wooden drawer, scale models of furniture) and two framed black-and-white photographs



In 1985, we participated in an exhibition at Centre Georges Pompidou, L’architecture est un jeu magnifique, whose argument that architecture is a magnificent game* was inspired by a Le Corbusier quote. Thirty young European architects were invited to build models of imaginary architecture out of Lego. We constructed a room under a gabled roof, in an undefined, generic house, similar to the attic rooms of our childhood. Two largeformat, black-and-white photographs, like stills from a movie made after World War II, show the interior of the garrets and a view of the room next door where a young woman is seen sitting on a bed. The furnishings, also in the form of scaled-down models, are in a built-in drawer under the Plexiglas case. We saved the Lego pieces for the outside walls and roof but used the ones with which we invented architecture as children rather than those supplied by the competition. (J.H. & P.d.M., April 2015)

We give a view into and from one specific room. Images of a child’s room, images connected with our youth, our memories of fantasies we had during the day and at night. Images of fear, sleep, and eroticism. Working at these images is an architectural work [...]. Supported by the transparent design, we gave the model house a form as general, ordinary, and familiar to us as possible: any house, anywhere in the world. In reality, it ought to be a very particular, unique, specific building, whose color, whose smell, whose ugly neighbors, whose plywood front and asphalt details we cannot and do not want to show or make noticeable in a model. A model always remains a model. (Herzog & de Meuron, 1984: “One specific room”, excerpt from the text imprinted on the Lego House) * Le Corbusier’s exact words were, “L’architecture est le jeu, savant, correct et magnifique des volumes sous la lumière.” (Vers une architecture, 1923) This was translated into English as “Architecture is the masterfully correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light.”



Auf dem Wolf Signal Box (project , realization ‒)

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VitraHaus, Vitra Campus, Weil am Rhein, Germany, Basel agglomeration (project ‒, realization ‒), April 



: Sketch by Jacques Herzog for the House for an Art Collector, Therwil, Canton of BaselLandschaft (project , realization ). Handwritten note: “Abstraction in architecture? / before: Architecture is abstraction / today: ‘abstract + figurative’ images of architecture / our task: …create a lively and diverse reality. Thus a way of synthesizing the ‘abstract + figurative’ images that are both at hand and peripheral”



: Stone House, Tavole, Italy (project , realization ‒) , : Sketches by Jacques Herzog for the Stone House, Tavole, Italy, . Handwritten note: “interior ‘cross’ / red-orange’ // concrete skeleton (unitary structure?) / without color”



: Central Signal Box (competition , project , realization –), September  [] : Signal Box Auf dem Wolf (project , realization ‒) []



Actelion Business Center, Allschwil, Canton of Basel-Landschaft (project ‒, realization ‒), September  []

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Building 1 under construction on the Roche Basel Site (project ‒, realization ‒); in the background, St. Chrischona hill, June  []

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Kleinbasel from the roof of the Messe parking garage, April . Behind the building in the foreground, Landhof stadium; in the background, the Roche Basel Site []

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Aerial view of Landhof, s: in the foreground, Rosental primary school (after the school was relocated in , the building was razed to leave room for the Messe parking garage, which opened in ); in the background, the Rhine



The relationship children establish with the spaces in which they grow up is crucial in later life. We do not choose the surroundings of our childhood; they are given. This immediate, selfevident, and uninhibited relationship is a form of protection that gives us freedom of action in adulthood; it is a source of individual vitality. Many people do not understand this. They believe that children should be sent to international schools so that they can learn three languages and form a close network of contacts, etc. That’s nonsense. Actually, I think that a modest, relatively simple, and somewhat provincial background is a fundamental experience. Without it, Beuys could never have created a work like Straßen­bahnhaltestelle [Streetcar Stop, 1976]. (J.H., February 2011)

We had a view of Landhof soccer stadium from the terrace; at the time it was FC Basel’s home field and it was in use as a stadium up until the 2000s. I watched my daughter play an international match there for the under-17 Swiss team. In the early seventies, FC Basel began to finish high in the standings of the national league, and for the past fifteen years they have

been practically the only Swiss club to play in European competitions. The Landhof was one of the few stadiums certified for international matches, and we never missed a match. It was the “good old days of soccer,” when players lived in the neighborhood and we could socialize with them. As children, we were always playing soccer the minute we had a chance. In the fifties the neighborhood was populated primarily by families who had moved there after the war, so there were a lot of children and it was very lively. Not many people of my parent’s generation live there anymore and they are dwindling fast. In the 1950s, Kleinbasel was still an industrial, working-class district and home to the Warteck brewery and the Roche factories. The Roche site has changed significantly. Today it houses mainly the head office and research department, but in those days it was the center of chemical industrial production and smelled accordingly. The combination of strong emissions from the chemical industry and the beer brewery gave our neighborhood a very distinctive smell. (J.H., May 2013)

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The building at Peter Rot-Strasse from Landhof stadium, April  []



View northward from the corner of Peter Rot-Strasse and Chrischonastrasse, April  []



The house I was born in is on the corner of Chrischonastrasse and Peter Rot-Strasse. The white fountain where I used to fetch water as the youngest child is still there, and so is the red beech, which must have been planted in 1934 when our house was built. My parents moved there in 1946. As the name of the Chrischonastrasse suggests, we were able to see St. Chrischona hill because there were fewer buildings then. The building on the right also dates from the thirties. A clever developer, a certain Baumgartner, built the same neo-baroque apartment buildings all over the city. The Roche laboratories and production facilities are at the end of the street. There was much less there in my childhood and the buildings weren’t as tall. On the other side of

the street, our house faced a parking lot with some wooden barracks on it. The Roche facilities in Kleinbasel were an important and extremely active production site with the noise and smell emissions to go with it. We are emptying the house to do some work on it. I’m the client and am working with a team of young architects in charge of the project. Had it been a question of maximizing returns, we would have torn the whole thing down and rebuilt it at twice the size. But I wanted to preserve the house, and especially the tree. Besides, it seemed difficult to incorporate a contemporary house into this neighborhood. So we are going to preserve it and add a small new extension on three sides. (P.d.M., February 2011)

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, ,   : Views of the Kunstgewerbeschule (architect Hermann Baur, ), April  []

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

Our primary school (the Rosentalschulhaus) was torn down in 1966 to make room for the parking garage of the convention center. I remember the large open staircase, the three extra high stories, the central avant-corps of the classically symmetrical building, boys on the left, girls on the right. Jacques and I had been assigned to the only mixed class, an experiment, as they said. In the early sixties, our neighborhood changed dramatically through the construction of the Kunstgewerbeschule between Vogelsangstrasse, Peter Rot-Strasse, and Riehenstrasse. It was built on a large tract of land that until then had been a

farm, the last one in the city. The farm gave way to a huge construction site surrounded by a paling fence and it became part of our path on the way to school. The complex was designed by Hermann Baur; it is good, aboveaverage architecture and clearly shows the influence of Le Corbusier’s priory in La Tourette. Every day for months we watched the progress of the construction. In the courtyard one day, just before completion, there appeared a concrete sculpture by Jean Arp that made a great impression on us: it was our first encounter with modern art. (P.d.M., May 2013)

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Rear of the new Messe hall and parking garage built in  by Suter + Suter AG (Basel), seen from the gateway of the Landhof onto Riehenstrasse, April  []



There were several painters in my family history but only one architect. He lived in Hamburg in the nineteenth century. My parents would have preferred to have me study civil or mechanical engineering because they felt it was less “artistic,” a safer and less risky profession. So I chose architecture to be somewhat contrary. Ultimately, the whole business of finding an orientation was pretty lame and mindless; I had no passion for anything in particular. Choosing a university was just as haphazard. Jacques and I didn’t want to go to the ETH [Federal Institute of Technology] in Zurich, so we enrolled in the Poly-

technic, the EPF in Lausanne. Being bilingual, it gave me a chance to immerse myself in the French language and culture again, which I very much wanted to do. Studying in Lausanne proved incredibly beneficial. The first year was a simple and not very challenging introduction to architecture: study of traditional buildings in the Vaudoise hinterland, making plans, models, a lot of tinkering without much theoretical background, and, on top of that, very regimented. Actually, it wasn’t so bad after all to be introduced to architecture and familiarized with it in that way. (P.d.M., February 2011)

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Messe Basel – New Hall (project ‒, realization ‒). : Facade along Riehenring, April  []; : the “hole” in the building above Messeplatz, March  []

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

Herzog & de Meuron has recently constructed a number of buildings in Basel—the extension of the Messe, the convention center, and Roche Tower in particular—that have had a strong visual impact on the city and serve as new reference points in an extensive urban landscape. They complement earlier projects—the signal boxes installed adjacent to the railroad tracks in the nineties and the Schaulager inaugurated in —in addition to ushering in a new phase. With their location and framing, these architectural objects play a role in the urban fabric far beyond their iconic value. Their function as reference points goes hand-in-hand with a formal clarity that signals a break with an ossified typology or the muddle of their surroundings. But the invented form also enters into dialogue with different components of urban life. The Messe building is an interrupter, a reflector, and a light trap; it also suggests an architectural continuity, analogous to lanes of traffic: the suspended white band seems to traverse the city. Not only does this produce a sense of urban clarity, it also imparts a feeling of wonder or fantasy. The dynamics of a building function on an imaginary plane that connects the dimensions of proximity and geographic mobility. The photos taken by Pierre de Meuron reveal the imaginary that inspired the project design. .



Views of the new Messe hall. : In the foreground the Messe parking garage (Suter + Suter AG, /), March ; : The facade along Riehenring, September  []

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Messe Basel – New Hall, Messeplatz, March []

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View of the new Messe hall from Clarastrasse, April 

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View toward the southeast from a building on Sperrstrasse, March : emerging from Kleinbasel are the new Messe hall, the Messeturm (Morger & Degelo Architekten, ‒), and buildings on the Roche Basel Site []



Without the bend in the Rhine, the city of Basel would not exist [...]. The “knee” of the Rhine is a sculptural event, a kind of urban idea of nature. The bent urban space along the Rhine therefore marks what is indisputably the most impressive location-specific urban experience in the city of Basel [...]. A part of the city, a continuation of its silhouette, always remains hidden behind the curve [...]. However, from whatever viewpoint, the city shows itself as a conglomerate of architecture from all epochs of the city’s history. Such a spatial experience is only possible because the development of the city has consistently followed the course of the Rhine river. The evolving, curved architectural space takes up the flow of the

river, showing it spatially. The city’s architecture becomes a geometric expression of a natural form—the form of the Rhine. Basel can be recognized, identified, and understood due to this clear and distinct urban relationship of the various quarters to the Rhine [...]. But above and below the city center, where this development along the river is absent, the city seems to fall into pieces, dissolving or withdrawing into the hinterland. It seems to have ceased. Does the countryside or suburbs or nature begin there? The city withdraws from the river, from the water, from the traffic on it, and from the ships. Why? (Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, and Rémy Zaugg, Basel:­A­Nascent­City?, 1991–1992)

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Herzog & de Meuron in collaboration with Rémy Zaugg, proposals for building along the Rhine; two plates from the urban study Basel: A Nascent City?, commissioned by the Gewerbeverband Basel-Stadt, ‒

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Roche Building 1 from Schwarzwaldbrücke, March  []

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The Roche Basel Site along Grenzacherstrasse. : View toward the east, September,  []; : View toward the west, Pharma Research Building 92, Herzog & de Meuron in collaboration with Rémy Zaugg (project ‒, realization ‒), September  []

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View toward the west along Grenzacherstrasse, April : Roche Basel Site, on the right, Building 92 []

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, ,   : Roche Basel Site, Roche Pharma Research Building 92



The pilot study for the new research facility was finalized in May 1996. The architects Pierre de Meuron and Jacques Herzog speak of a possible painterly intervention. [...] In this kind of collaboration, the architect comes first. The artist comes afterwards. It is for the artist, therefore, to adapt and react, to understand and interpret. For him to catch up and assimilate what already exists in order to become a true partner, able to share in a dialogue. The pictorial intervention must come out of the architecture. More than that, it must make it seem as if the artistic act and the architecture were conceived simultaneously and that one is

unthinkable without the other. Art will thus be intimately linked to architecture and will seem irreducibly necessary. Once finished, the work of the painter will give the impression that it was desired, called for, and willed by the architecture, which, without the art, could not have become what it had to be and would have remained incomplete. It is on this one condition that the work of the artist is legitimate, justified, and meaningful. If the artist succeeds, it will seem as if he has done nothing, his work having been willed and dictated by the architecture itself. The artist will disappear behind the manifest necessity of the work. [...] 

Rémy Zaugg, wall painting project for Roche Pharma Research Building 92, sectional view of the facade along Grenzacherstrasse, ‒. Typography: Michèle Zaugg-Röthlisberger, infography: Loïc Raguénès

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

The wall has an orientation. It has a front and a back. Its front is visible; its back merges into the anonymity of the laboratory walls, each one story high. Behind the wall, then, the laboratories: in front, spaces for central or vital research: the library, the lecture hall. In back, everyday analytical effort; in front, storage and consultation of knowledge, the exchange of hypotheses and emerging theses. In back, a closed room with limited access; in front, a semi-open place for encounters and conversations. In back, the almost non-existent obviousness of the horizontal; in front, the vertical consciousness of a mediating func-

tion, totally transparent. In back, the modesty of non-visibility: in front, selfaffirmation gesturing toward the world. The wall of the glass tower invites the gaze. It is present inside and it is visible from the street. It is imposing, not solipsistic, since it opens itself to the world by making itself visible to the city. One will have seen it before entering, or at least perceived a vertical presence. Rémy Zaugg, “Genèse de l’œuvre. Journal, 1998–2000,” in Une architecture de Herzog & de Meuron. Une peinture murale de Rémy Zaugg. Une œuvre pour Roche Bâle, Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2001.

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View to the east from Roche Building 1 under construction, June . In the background, the dam on the Rhine and the hydroelectric power plant []

Dam on the Rhine and hydroelectric power plant (architect Hans Hofmann, ), in the background, Roche Building 1, August  []



The Birsfelden dam and hydroelectric power plant, built in 1953–54, is one of the most interesting projects to be designed by Hans Hofmann, in addition to Hall 2 of the Messe, the convention center in Basel. The lightflooded turbine hall of the power plant is unusually attractive with its distinctive Y-shaped supports bearing the glazed facade and the zigzag roof floating on top. People passing by cannot help gazing in awe and wonder at the immense interior with its machinery polished to a high gloss. Upriver from the city, the dam has created a reservoir where I go rowing. The little buildings lining the dam are ingenious: they counteract the solidity and weight of the steel and concrete construction. Painted green, the roof slants inward to form a gentle negative peak, the two portholes, and the

white door: all of these inimitable features make a deep impression. The green concrete cubes have been transformed into six alert owls. The wooden fishing huts on the shore are also little creatures with long feelers; they look at the water and respond to the eyes of the owls. From this location, one can imagine how the future Roche tower will fit into the panorama of the city. It will rise next to the rectangular building, which, at a height of barely 56 meters, looks like a miniature copy of the United Nations headquarters in New York. The white smokestack, situated a little farther away on the Roche premises, is 100 meters tall. Building 1 will rise to 178 meters—a gigantic leap in scale on the Basel skyline. (P.d.M., February 2011)

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Dam on the Rhine and hydroelectric power plant (architect Hans Hofmann, ), July  [] and February 



Herzog & de Meuron initially established a reputation making small projects. The design of Turbine Hall for the Tate Modern in London marked a change in scale. This transformation of former industrial premises into a museum and a monument created a memorable impression of Herzog and de Meuron in their native Basel and Europe as well. Basel has always been a city of both trade and industry. As Jacques Herzog points out, the current concentration of large pharmaceutical companies goes back to a specialization in the dye industry during the nineteenth century. “The importance of this industry allowed the development of architecture offices like Suter + Suter and Burckhardt & Partners, which became the largest in Switzerland. We are part of this tradition. The commissions we receive from industry have permitted us to keep a foot in the city.” The expression is a euphemism. The firm clearly has more than “a foot in the city,” as highlighted by the omnipresence of Roche Tower in Basel’s cityscape. In Basel, the language of industrial forms finds monumental expression in the buildings linked to the Rhine, the pharmaceutical industry, the convention center, and cross-border commerce: Hans Bernoulli’s silo tower in the harbor, Otto Salvisberg’s buildings for Roche, and Hans Hofmann’s projects, namely the convention hall with the clock and the dam on the Rhine. Karl Moser’s St. Anthony’s Church saw one of 

the leading exponents of eclecticism embrace modernism. Herzog and de Meuron studied these milestones of Basel’s architectural landscape. They were equally interested in the results of the research carried out in the field of social housing. One of the first projects by Basel native Hannes Meyer, later director of the Bauhaus, was the Siedlung Freidorf (‒); it is exemplary of social housing at the very end of the preindustrial era. Herzog and de Meuron also admire the work of Hans Schmidt, whom they met during their studies and whose Schaeffer House Pierre de Meuron restored for his own use. The reorganization of working-class housing to meet sanitary and hygienic standards formed part of a break with the picturesque, patrimonial tradition in the name of the communist ideal. The monumental visibility of the large industrial facilities is of another order. And yet these two scales coexisting in the urban environment show formal correspondences.

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  : Interior and exterior views of the silo tower in the harbor of Basel (architect Hans Bernoulli, ), June  []

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, ,   : St. Anthony’s Church (Antoniuskirche) on Kannenfeldstrasse (architect Karl Moser, ‒), April  []

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

Primarily active in Zurich, Karl Moser was one of Switzerland’s foremost architects in the early twentieth century. In Zurich, he built the Kunsthaus. His most important contribution in Basel is St. Anthony’s Church, a tribute to modernism inspired by the Perret brothers’ Notre-Dame du Raincy (1922–23). Thirty years earlier, during his historicist

phase, Moser had built the Badische Bahnhof, of particular interest because of its grand concourse, and St. Paul’s Church, which is beautifully integrated into the urban fabric. The two churches, built thirty years apart, are located on the same boulevard, less than a kilometer apart. (J.H., February 2011)

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Aerial view of the area around the German railway station (Badischer Bahnhof), July . Along the railway line, top right (gray roofs), are the WoBA and the Schorenmatten housing development; inside the right-hand curve of the tracks (tiled roofs) is the garden suburb Im Vogelsang

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Garden suburb Im Vogelsang, Paracelsusstrasse, Hirzbrunnen quarter (architect Hans Bernoulli, ). : April  [];  : March  []



Working-class housing developments were built to the east and west of the city beginning in the 1920s. When we were children we knew nothing about them; we never went there. It was not until we started studying architecture that they came to our attention because they are one of the first projects of this kind in Europe. They were built in the countryside; there was nothing around them. And yet they created a piece of the city, of urban life. Today they are integrated into the urban landscape, but most of them still maintain their identity. (J.H., September 2014)

Close to Kleinbasel but on the other side of the German railway tracks, Hans Bernoulli built his housing estate in 1926, in the Hirzbrunnen quarter. It

is a sought-after neighborhood. It is neither very expensive nor very big. It is beautifully proportioned and there are backyard gardens. Three exceptional modern architects were active in Basel in the 1920s: Hans Bernoulli (1876–1959), Hannes Meyer (1889–1954), and Hans Schmidt (1893–1972). All three devoted themselves to social housing. Hannes Meyer took the lead building the garden suburb Freidorf from 1919 to 1921; it was to become an international model of cooperative housing. Built out in the country, to the southeast of the city in Muttenz, it is now part of the urban fabric near St. Jakob Stadium. Hans Bernoulli was a socialist. He wrote about building and land rights, espousing the view that land as a limited resource should belong to the state, with 

private ownership restricted to the built architecture. His views met with little support although he was elected as a member of the National Council and became a professor at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. However, his leftwing politics cost him his chair. The garden suburb Im Vogelsang is a cooperative development with private ownership but as part of a community. There have been few architectural modifications over the past ninety years thanks to strict regulations. Plans to insulate the brick walls have fortunately been dropped. Nor have the colors changed: the front doors are all painted red and the window frames white. The only less fortunate features are the flat windows set into the distinctive tiled roofing;

they no doubt provide additional daylight but they mar the impression of the whole. Fair-faced brick walls have been used throughout, lending the ensemble a homogeneity and expressive impact unusual in Switzerland. It is like being transported to the midst of a London suburb. The continuity of the red brick facades along with the tiled gabled roofs contribute to the monolithic and monochromatic appearance of the overall ensemble. The copper gutters that almost disappear in the short eaves reinforce this aspect. The neighborhood is like a world of its own, with small apartments and adjoining gardens. The quality of life is above average, which explains the area’s enduring popularity. (P.d.M., February 2011)

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Garden suburb Freidorf, Muttenz, Canton of Basel-Landschaft (architect Hannes Meyer, ‒). : Aerial view, s; the largest building is the cooperative house. : View of the vegetable gardens, with St. Jakob Tower in the distant background, April  []

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St. Jakob Tower (project ‒, realization ‒), on a bank of the river Birs in the neighborhood of St. Jakob, June  [] 

View of the housing development Schorenmatten, Hirzbrunnen quarter (architects Hans Schmidt and Paul Artaria, ‒), April  []

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: Housing development Schorenmatten, view from the railroad line, April  [] : Site plan of the Wohnausstellung (WoBA), Swiss housing exhibition, Eglisee quarter, . The largest development is Schorenmatten, by Schmidt and Artaria, which consists of six rows of terraced houses (black) on the right of the railway tracks.

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Historians and sociologists criticized garden cities; they considered them anti-urban negations of the city, as it were. But cities are governed by many different concepts and typologies; truth is not monolithic. The housing estates described here are typically low density, built on the city outskirts at a time when there still seemed to be unlimited space “in the country.” The density of the city increased substantially in the course of the nineteenth century and one cannot help thinking of Haussmann's Paris. By the 1920s, life in the city center had become unhealthy. The city therefore spread out beyond their borders in search of air, light, sun, and land. The consequences are well known. In the spirit of modernism, urbanization advanced relentlessly in the second half of the twentieth century, encouraged by the potential of individualized travel. This phenomenon motivated us to take the relationship of “built” to “non-built” as the point of departure for new strategies in dealing with various building typologies; for instance, stacking or combining

various typologies on a single site. This is basically what we did at Rue des Suisses in Paris where we created a vibrant urban block by combining street-front accommodations, courtyard apartments, and small single-family homes. (P.d.M., February 2011)

Just five hundred meters down the railroad tracks from Bernoulli’s garden suburb, Hans Schmidt, Paul Artaria, and August Künzel built the first flatroofed buildings: the Schorenmatten housing project (1927–29) followed by a section of the Eglisee Housing Development (1929–30). They were constructed for the Wohnausstellung Basel, WOBA, an exhibition of avantgarde housing prototypes built to full scale and comparable to other Werkbund housing developments in Stuttgart, Vienna, and Zurich. As students, we were extremely impressed by these projects. For Aldo Rossi’s seminar, we had prepared a brochure, Neues Bauen, presenting the different typologies along with plans and contemporary documents. Hans Schmidt 

and the magazine ABC, published in Zürich from 1924 to 1928, were crucial references for Rossi. It is not easy to wax enthusiastic about parts of the housing estate today because some twenty-five years ago, “In den Schorenmatten” underwent irresponsible renovations. Sheer devastation! Practically none of the original features have survived and nothing could be done about it because the development was not a registered historic site. Such a pity! The architects of modernism have only recently begun to receive the recognition they deserve. Luckily, and probably thanks to the cooperative’s regulations, most of the architecture has survived in its original state.

The “restoration” destroyed the very spirit of the architecture that set it apart from today’s built banalities. At the time, an abstract, flat-roofed house was radically innovative, applauded by the left and the avantgarde. Its modernism has now become ordinary, having lost the radicalism and clarity of form that once distinguished it. Before the mass production of building elements, architects were exacting in the design of details—the plaster, the window profiles, the doorframes. If you destroy this, you destroy everything. Renovating is expensive. Defining the qualities that have to be preserved is a political decision: Can housing for ordinary people be of historical value?

(P.d.M., February 2011)

(J.H., February 2011)

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Housing development Schorenmatten, Hirzbrunnen quarter; architects Hans Schmidt and Paul Artaria, created for the Wohnausstellung (WoBA) Swiss housing exhibition, . View of the gardens in the s () and April  () []

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Housing development Schorenmatten in the s () and in September , after renovation []. This has taken different forms, with some facades being repainted in various colors ( ), and others being clad with panels ( ) ;

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Comparison between houses in the original state and after renovation ( ): the facade has been covered with thick insulation, finished with a coat of plaster. 

Hans Schmidt and Paul Artaria, the designs appeared in the review ABC in . : Project for townhouses with steel structures; : variations on single-family homes (Schaeffer House, Riehen, )

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Hans Schmidt and Paul Artaria, Schaeffer House, Riehen, Canton of Basel-Stadt: in  () and in  after the restoration by Pierre de Meuron () 

Back in 1977 in the Basel magazine The Village Cry, we already compared two projects that meant so much to us while studying: the competition proposal designed by Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer for the Petersschule in the old town of Basel (1926–27); and the Schaeffer House in Riehen designed by Hans Schmidt and Paul Artaria (1927–28). These are two very different, innovative projects, but they are both, each in their own way, manifestoes of the New Architecture. Meyer/Wittwer’s design of the Petersschule was considered too radical at the time and was never realized. However, the Schmidt building exists and was conceived as a prototype of row housing. Its composition is extremely interesting. Two volumes are placed at right angles, one on top of the other with the living area downstairs and the bedrooms upstairs. Sick and tired of bourgeois Switzerland, Schmidt emigrated to Russia in the 1930s. Many “modern” homes in Basel still feature the conventions of a wellto-do, bourgeois lifestyle. In Schmidt’s

house there was no servant’s entrance, a rather unconventional decision in those days. The house was up for sale in 1990, but no one was interested in buying it. Finally, Dominique and I decided to acquire it. The house as seen in the photographs of 1929 was no longer recognizable: it was completely hidden behind trees and had been modified over the years, in some cases for the worse. It could not have been easy to live there, with neither sun protection nor an overhang. Later, in Zurich, Schmidt did include overhangs, but there were none here, not even on the south side. It was very hot in summer and cold in winter. The previous owners had made changes that contradicted the original philosophy of the building. I have tried to make the house habitable and to restore the clarity of the form. We glazed the open but covered space to make a vestibule that is neither insulated nor heated, with temperatures often no more than 40°F in winter, but it does reduce the extremes in temperature inside 

the house. The architectural integrity of the house was no doubt impaired by adding a glass wall facing the garden and the use of brown PVC for the windows, as a consequence of questionable renovations. I installed double glazed windows, designed to preserve the continuity of the facade. Since the size of windowpanes was still limited when the house was built, the large windows comprise four panes of glass. I preserved their proportions with central, crossed muntins because this design contributes to the quality of the facade. The right angle of the panes of glass supports the basic rectilinearity of the overall design of the facade. Arthur Rüegg studied and described the Schaeffer House with great precision for a seminar, carefully analyzing the architects’ use of color based on the theory of the primary colors, red, blue, and yellow, along with white, gray, and black. The result is a remarkable brochure (in German) detailing the fascinating biography of this unique architectural achievement by Artaria and Schmidt.

Fifteen years later, we needed more room for our three growing children; the only bathroom was tiny, the entire house very poorly soundproofed—the perfect apartment for subsistence living! I wanted to enlarge the house and submitted a design that, to me, reflected the spirit of the original architecture. A new addition, as an independent loadbearing structure, would be placed like a kind of table on top of the house. However, the proposal was rejected by the historic preservation authorities and rightfully so, in hindsight. So we ended up moving into two houses that I designed. (P.d.M., August 2010)

References: Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, “Rationale Architektur und historische Bezugnahme,” The Village Cry, no. 3 (1977); Arthur Rüegg, Artaria & Schmidt Wohnhaus Schaeffer, Riehen-Basel 1927/1928. Erneuerung: Herzog & de Meuron 1990/1991, Zurich: Institute GTA/ETH, 1993.

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: Two interior views of the Schaeffer House after renovation; : a page from the publication by Arthur Rüegg, Artaria & Schmidt Wohnhaus Schaeffer, Riehen-Basel /. Erneuerung: Herzog & de Meuron /

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Hans Schmidt and Paul Artaria, Schaeffer House in Riehen: in  () and in  after the restoration by Pierre de Meuron () 

View of the housing development Zu den Drei Linden from Bäumlihofstrasse, between Basel and Riehen, February 

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For a visit with Rossi’s seminar students, we also analyzed the Zu den Drei Linden housing estate built in the early 1940s by Ernst Mumenthaler, Otto Meier, and August Künzel. We went into the apartments and spoke with the tenants, where we learned that the buildings had been excellently designed for everyday use. Construction and structural details were executed to exceptionally high standards and the condition of the buildings is remarkable. This observation makes me think of Otto Meier’s son, Mario. He was one of our first coworkers in the early 1980s. He loved working on construction and had a keen sense of materials, both rare qualities. His father had built Zu den Drei Linden during World War II, creating avantgarde architecture that references Switzerland’s policy of the national redoubt. The facade is like a fortress to the north and is flanked by balconies and gardens to the south. In Bernoulli’s

housing estate, Im Vogelsang, people walk past the gardens; the private plots are connected with shared areas and paths. In Meier’s project, inside and outside are clearly distinguished and the private gardens can only be accessed by their respective owners. The fortress-like impression is indicative of a historical reaction and mirrors the situation of Switzerland in the midst of a European war. At the same time the quality of the architecture is exceptional. There is no correspondence between the facades to the north and south; solid, uninviting plaster on one side, openness and warm timber on the other. The gardens are relatively spacious, large enough to satisfy the need for self-sufficient living during the war: tenants planted potatoes in them. A niche is created for each private entrance by a small tower attached to the facade that houses the stairwell. At the end of the row, a wall is set back from the street, closing off the ensemble at the corner. 

The color scheme is of interest as well. Modern architecture in Basel is not white; it is gray or ocher. It is not the (Mediterranean) play of sunlight on architecture, as seen in Le Corbusier’s work. The most astonishing feature perhaps is the coexistence of urban and rural elements. The ensemble is functional; the detailing of the dimensions, the composition, and the rhythm are remarkable. The skylights on the roofs seem to be original. There are probably two typologies: some roofs have a skylight and others do not. The large overhanging roofs emphasize the building’s line of sight. From a distance, especially from the street between Basel and Riehen, only the roof is visible; the building seems to disappear under the shadow of the overhang. A large unbuilt field, the Bäumlihof, separates the housing from the street. The plots belonged to a family of landowners, who still live there. When they planned to build on

some of the land in the 1960s, a group of tenants launched a campaign to change the zoning to non-buildable land and have it be purchased by the city. This happened in the early 1970s when I was still studying at the ETH in Zurich. I had just read Bernoulli’s book, Die Stadt und ihr Boden, about cities and the land they own. In 1983, there was another referendum and the city had to pay the family millions in compensation. Had Bernoulli’s system been accepted, the city would not have had to pay. In any case, this green zone marks a break between Basel and Riehen and is part of the large recreational area in the midst of the city. It is a good thing that the built area is clearly delineated. But in my opinion, the area should be flanked by a row of higher buildings to emphasize the border, like Central Park in New York. (P.d.M., February 2011)

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Views of the housing development Zu den Drei Linden (architects Ernst Mumenthaler and Otto Meier, ), February 

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Housing development Zu den Drei Linden from Bäumlihofstrasse, March  []

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Fronted by the Bäumlihof, the Zu den Drei Linden housing development might be compared to an island or an ark. In contrast to the Weissenhof Development in Stuttgart, built in 1927 under the direction of Mies van der Rohe, the tenants were not subjected to an avant-garde aesthetic they didn’t understand. The architects decided to use familiar forms—as in old times. But the story can also be told differently: Otto Meier was a Protestant, a communist, and an avowed champion of the working class. In the early twentieth century, for architects like

him utopian models of society went hand-in-hand with a willingness to break with traditional forms. The situation had changed drastically by 1944. Zu den Drei Linden stands for something we know from stories of postrevolutionary times: the pursuit of a social revolution that is not headed up by a cultural elite and that is not devoted to formal innovation but rather espouses an egalitarian philosophy in opposition to independent aesthetics imposed by an elite. It is a vision of the future that deeply respects tradition. (J.H., February 2011)

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Housing development Zu den Drei Linden. : Site layout, floor plans for different housing types, ; : View in March  []

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Zu den Drei Linden, view of the gardens, March  []

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Ai Weiwei introduced us to the development project of the district of Jindong, in Jinhua, a city of four million inhabitants located three hundred kilometers southwest of Shanghai. The city had asked him to design a park in memory of his father, the poet Ai Qing, who was born in Jinhua. He had been given the opportunity to study the master plan that had been worked out for the new quarter and persuaded the city to commission us to rethink the project. The Jindong project was to become a new urban center with shops, cultural and leisure facilities, office space, and housing for 100,000 people. The proposal for this vast district never left the drawing board. Constant delays and the Chinese method of

working made it impossible to launch the project, on which several architects would have cooperated. We invested a great deal of energy in trying to find suitable architecture, proposing various typologies that would create a rich and vibrant urban mix. We wanted a wealth of typologies and a unity of materials. So, for example, we proposed using brick. The Chinese were extremely surprised because they tend to reject traditional modes of building as “archaic” or “outdated.” There are several magnificent brick buildings in Jinhua; we suggested they take up this heritage and finally succeeded in persuading them. We even built brick mockups to full scale to illustrate the master plan. (J.H., December 2008)

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Jindong, urban planning of a new neighborhood in Jinhua, Zhejiang Province, China (project ‒): in the Basel offices of Herzog & de Meuron, model of the masterplan, December  ( /). : Mario Meier and Roman Aebi, who introduced the use of fractured bricks on this project, with Ascan Mergenthaler, February 

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Brickwork trials for constructions in the new neighborhood of Jindong, in Jinhua. : mock-up preserved in the Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron Kabinett, Helsinki Dreispitz, April  [] ; : construction of prototypes in Jinhua, February and August 

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Our work in Jinhua came to a halt even before construction began. Something has surely been built in the meantime, possibly even according to some of our instructions. It’s difficult to find out what has been done without actually going there. But, astonishingly, something did come out of the project, namely a sculptural object that we call Jinhua Structure. Ai Weiwei was commissioned by the city to design an architecture park with experimental pavilions. We had been working for more than a year on the urban planning scheme and we decided to use the repertoire of motifs developed for the buildings as a kind of molecular

structure or genetic code. Jinhua Structure is our only attempt to generate an architectural form synthetically, as it were, by using a computer program. It produced unexpected, unfamiliar forms in endless variations, as in nature—like cloud formations or mountain cliffs. In both clouds and rocks we can discover forms and places that look as if they were inviting us to sit or lie down, for example, caves or large overhangs. Such places are also found in the Jinhua Structure, of which a first version in colored concrete has become a favorite among visitors to the park. (J.H., December 2008)

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Jinhua Structure, Version II - Vertical (massive, laminated wood), in the park of the Beyeler Foundation, Riehen, 

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Goetheanum (architect Rudolf Steiner, ‒), headquarters of the General Anthroposophical Society, Dornach, Canton of Solothurn. : Views of the staircase, February  and July  []; : Exterior view, July  []

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At the scale of the Birs river valley, the Goetheanum has an urban dimension, like the Schaulager located further downstream towards Basel. They are landmarks, massive buildings which evoke a skull and a face. (P.d.M., February 2011)

The Goetheanum is essentially antifunctionalist architecture. A rather ugly but intriguing building, it has made a lasting impact on twentiethcentury architecture. It works best at its most abstract as demonstrated by the coherence and integrity of the great hall, which looks as if a single volume had been hollowed out. The movement of the central staircase is enthralling. It ascends in a spiral, alternating shadow and light … and enters the void before disappearing

into shadow and mass. The largest landing frames a view of the hill and draws it into the interior. The scenography is extraordinary! The second landing takes us to a large red stainedglass window that suggests all the features of a monumental entrance while bathing the room in a soft red glow. Steiner took an extremely sculptural approach and was more responsive to theatrical intuition than to structural logic. He calls the interior of the building an “expression of the soul.” The upper part of the stairwell is the pinnacle of anthroposophical architecture. Steiner’s design is most successful when it shows a nonnarrative, almost abstract quality that transcends the pale of anthroposophical ideology. (J.H., February 2011)

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View toward Basel from the roof of the Goetheanum: in the distance, the Messeturm and Roche Building 1 under construction, July  []

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Roche Building 1, staircase under construction, June  []

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Musée Unterlinden, Colmar, staircase under construction, April , and the staircase in the Piscine (performance hall, former city swimming pool), September  []

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View of the new wing of the Musée Unterlinden, Colmar (competition , project ‒, realization ‒), near completion, autumn  [].

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Ricola Storage Building, Laufen, Canton of Basel-Landschaft, – []

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Ricola is a family business, operated by the son and grandsons of the founder. Our first project for them (an office conversion) dates back to 1983. We have built two storage buildings, a factory extension, and a marketing building. With the exception of the warehouse in Mulhouse, all of the buildings are in Laufen, a small city on the river Birs, upstream from Dornach, some twenty kilometers south of Basel. The Ricola Kräuterzentrum (Herb Center) is on the outskirts of the city and surrounded by meadows. The production facility for bonbons, located on the same site, was built a few years earlier by engineers without the involvement of architects. Ricola felt that a purely functional production facility does not necessarily require aesthetic input. Nonetheless, they commissioned us to build their next project, the herb processing center. For us, the most important task was to accommodate the clearly defined processes of sorting, drying, mixing, and storing the herbs efficiently in a large but space-saving, cube-shaped building within loadbearing exterior walls. The logic of a simple geometric shape had to dovetail the rationale of the functions defined by the engineers. We soon came up with the idea of making the walls out of locally sourced loam. This was a technical challenge. Back in 1998, we already planned to use this material for the Schaulager but had to abandon the plan because the walls of the building rose to twenty meters in height. Making buildings out of earth is

a technique that is known primarily in developing countries. The Kräuterzentrum measures 111 × 29 × 11 meters and is the largest rammedearth building in Europe. Most importantly, it is the first contemporary industrial facility to be made out of rammed earth, an archaic building material that is not ordinarily associated with industrial architecture. The choice of material was a natural, basically self-evident consequence of the task at hand (herbs) and the location (Laufen). If not here and now, then where and when? The exterior walls have literally been rammed out of the earth on site. All of the components of the building material, bindings and additives, have been sourced from a radius of less than ten kilometers. The prefabricated blocks for the walls were produced in a facility rented for the duration of the construction. The lighter, horizontal bands consist of harder layers of cement to mitigate surface erosion. Four gigantic portholes provide natural daylight. Since rammed earth has little strength in tension but significant strength in compression, the sections of wall above the circular openings perform like arches. Rammed earth requires ten to twenty times less gray energy in production than concrete, makes efficient use of natural resources, can easily be reclaimed, and has a high thermal mass reducing operating expenses (see the gabion walls of the Dominus Winery). (P.d.M., May 2013)

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Ricola Kräuterzentrum (Herb Center), Laufen, Canton of Basel-Landschaft (project ‒, realization –), July  []

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  : Views of the Ricola Kräuterzentrum, Laufen, July  []

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Since the Tate Modern opened in London in the year , the firm’s scope of activities has gradually broadened. Completed projects, suspended projects, and projects in planning are found in the United States, Asia (Japan, China, and India), Latin America (Mexico, Brazil), and the Near East (Lebanon). This change of scale is the result of an inquiry into urban planning that began in ‒ with a study on the agglomeration of Basel, Basel: A Nascent City?, carried out in collaboration with Rémy Zaugg. It is the first project that Christine Binswanger, Senior Partner of Herzog & de Meuron along with Ascan Mergenthaler and Stefan Marbach, worked on when she joined the firm. “I was twenty-seven years old in  and had just graduated. I knew absolutely nothing about city planning. Some fifteen architects were employed at the time. For nine or ten months the Basel study was my only project. We were a small group of four people: Jacques, Pierre, Rémy, and myself. I had come from Zurich and did not know Basel. We would look at plans and they talked about all these places that meant nothing to me. So I took my motorbike, looked at everything, and took pictures. People were not yet particularly aware of a trinational territory. The point of departure for the commission was an analytical question: How can a city develop that has national, cantonal, and communal borders? We started out by analyzing the physical and mental borders that 

restricted development. For almost a year now there has been a tram connection to Germany. That was practically inconceivable in those days. We talked about things like: Why is it so easy for buses to cross the border and so hard for trams? The bus can just drive across the border but the tram requires physical intervention: tracks have to be laid into the territory of the other. In contrast to the train, the tram serves short stretches for daily local traffic. It erases the border a little bit. Rémy was instrumental in our taking this approach. It is not the way you usually talk about urbanism. He also helped us work out a visual syntax in making plans for urban development. Our work is still based on those principles even though the tools have changed—from silkscreen and adhesive foil to the computer.” One of the locations identified for development at the time was the district of Dreispitz, a vast zone of warehouses and businesses that narrows to a point in the south of the city, alongside the railroad tracks, to the start of the Birs Valley. It is there that the Schaulager was built at the beginning of the new millennium. Fifteen years later, Herzog & de Meuron built a new landmark. A building with offices and rental apartments above a four-story base housing the firm’s archives. The decision to store the firm’s “memory” on this site is a significant gesture.

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Map of the Basel agglomeration with national, cantonal, and community borders, and the location of the Dreispitz area, 

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View towards the center of Basel from the Helsinki Dreispitz building, July  []

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: View of the south facade of the Helsinki Dreispitz building, Helsinki-Strasse, Dreispitz area, Münchenstein, Canton of Basel-Landschaft (project ‒, realization ‒), March  []. : “New Focal Points” (Neue Schwerpunkte): summary map of the urban study of the Basel trinational agglomeration, . Key: Left bank of the Rhine: New Quarters by the Rhine / Campus of Knowledge / Band of Knowledge / Campus of Sport / Campus of the Image / Rheinhafen (housing); right bank of the Rhine: Rheinhafen (housing) / DB (German Railway) Sites / Housing / Working / Living by the Rhine

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Our concepts are not based on freely invented ideas or ideas derived from a specific urban theory, as is the case, for example, with the city of Enlightenment or the city of the modern age or the city of a mighty ruler. We don’t have an urban idea or a preconceived intention; such an idea would always be betrayed by the political, cultural, and economic reality of Basel. Nor was it even necessary to develop an idea, since the city, or rather, a possible future image of this city, emerged organically, as it were, in the course of our observations and descriptions of the existing urban reality. We discovered that the distinct structures of the quarters were like crystallized forms of the city’s growth and development. We discovered the railroad tracks, seemingly imitating the course of the

Rhine river like an artificial river system. We discovered that parts of the city whirled into the side valleys of the Rhine, hardly organized and less densely structured and populated [...]. The future space of the city with its currently unclear structure of neighborhoods and suburbs emerged by itself, as if perfectly obvious and selfevident, like an image slowly materializing on photographic paper in a darkroom. As it evolved, the image of urban settlement increasingly proved defined by the features of the natural environs. The natural space started to disappear and then reemerged in a transformed, architecturally designed form, expressed by the ever more clearly defined city structures. (Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, and Rémy Zaugg, Basel: A Nascent City?, 1991–1992)

: Proposals for urban development along the Birs valley, pages from the urban study Basel: A Nascent City? by Herzog & de Meuron in collaboration with Rémy Zaugg, –

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View of the Schaulager from Emil Frey-Strasse, Dreispitz area, Basel/Münchenstein, Canton of Basel-Landschaft (project –, realization ‒), March  []

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View of the Birs valley towards Arlesheim and Dornach from the Helsinki Dreispitz building, July  []

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View of the Helsinki Dreispitz building, July  []

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Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron Kabinett, Helsinki Dreispitz building: view of one of the floors housing the firm’s archives, April  []

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Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron Kabinett, Helsinki Dreispitz building, April  []. : In the cabinet on the right, archived facade models for the extension of the Tate Modern (The Tate Modern Project, ‒); on the pallet behind is a prototype facade mock-up of clay bricks for the planned Jindong development area in the city of Jinhua (China, ‒). : Models of the Lego House (‒) and for the redesign of the Marktplatz in central Basel, not realized (third proposal , after winning the competition in )

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

Conversation Jacques Herzog Pierre de Meuron Jean-François Chevrier Basel, June ‒, 

Jean-François Chevrier: In the essay at the start of this book I suggested, somewhat provocatively, that architecture is an “opportunistic profession.” You invent forms that address the public sphere. They contribute to a common, shared context to the extent that the public can take possession of them beyond their original function. Like Aldo Rossi, you consider the monument a form of permanence in an urban context whose function can change. This is the idea underlying your stadium in Beijing. Jacques Herzog: Yes. Now, in post-Olympic times, the Bird’s Nest is really working very well. It’s used for various events but also simply as a park. We designed it with that in mind. JFC: But you had to negotiate. You don’t bow to political or financial interests; you don’t let yourself be tied hand and foot. You manage to acquire some leeway, and within certain limits you are even able to modify the program. But, of course, you have to operate within a given framework; you do have to take political interests or financial criteria into account that don’t necessarily coincide with your own. The Beijing stadium is a good example, and I don’t think that Unibail’s explicitly commercial program for the Triangle tower in Paris was completely satisfactory for you, either. JH: Unlike an artist, an architect works under predefined conditions: there is a subject, a program, and a location. We can’t afford to be “opportunistic” under those circumstances. Why? Opportunists willingly make compromises to guarantee their personal profit. We have a pretty clear idea of the prospect and potential of every single project and are prepared to do everything in our power to make it come about. We don’t do that for ourselves but to do justice to the needs of the project and its users. Architecture is successful if people love, accept, and use it—not just now but for generations to come. To achieve this goal, a given program often has to be questioned and redefined, and the job of doing that is a key moment in the genesis of any project. Instead of opportunism, you could perhaps speak of tactical skill. Pierre de Meuron: In coming to terms with increasingly complex and unpredictable contexts and planning, it makes sense to add tactical skills to our mental systems of orientation and strategic intelligence. A project rarely follows a neat, straightforward course, like water in a channeled river; on the contrary, there are cross currents, diversions,

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 O and lateral interference. You move forward and backward, doubts follow achievements, and conversely. Such intentional or unexpected deviations can actually be beneficial to a project. Confronted with the complexity of political, economic, and cultural realities, we have to react and take action even when a situation is open to interpretation. All those involved in a project invariably develop their own ideas and make assumptions of which they may be unaware. That leads to differences in interpretation and their inevitable consequences: misunderstandings, discrepancies, controversies, arguments, and conflicts. In such cases, it is imperative to be realistic, not in opportunistic terms but rather in the complex sense of the term: that means understanding the unpredictable and ambiguous nature of a project and joining forces to develop strategies, somewhat like Japanese martial arts. You have to grasp certain possibilities in time, which may not have been discovered at the beginning, and exploit them to benefit the project. In this respect I would speak of opportunities. JH: Take the example of Roche. Was it opportunism for us to accept p.  a new, simpler, and less iconic project, one that is basically inscribed

in the tradition of the modernist syntax characteristic of the Roche premises in Basel? The opportunist would be content just to have the chance to put up buildings. But the project for Roche is about rethinkp.  ing what’s going on around it: a new, vibrant boulevard, a new park, a new relationship to the Rhine. p.  JFC: In our conversation of August , , Pierre said the client

wanted the project simplified; you were disappointed at first but then it ended up being better. Can you elaborate on that? PdM: Everyone agrees—at least at first sight—that the initial proposal was more innovative and inventive. But, of course, innovation is not the one and only criterion. The client felt that the conspicuous shape of the building did not adequately reflect the Roche image. The president of Roche did not want his firm represented by a building that he considered too spectacular. As he put it, he wanted something “more modest,” “more reserved,” “more classical.” The client intervened on an aesthetic level that is ordinarily the domain of the architect—and in this case, he turned out to be right. Accepting the client’s opinion was not opportunistic but opportune. Had the tower been built after the original design, it would have been innovative, beautiful, and complex in shape, but it would also have remained a singular building. It would

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 not have been integrated into the surroundings, marked by buildings with a simpler geometry. Variations on the form would have been difficult and would not have worked so well within the context of Roche’s ongoing urban development. JH: The overall appearance of the new tower is reminiscent of postwar p. , -, - modernism. The horizontal bands echo the vocabulary of the s and s. This conventional form, at once simple and iconic, is intentional. The maker, that is the architect, has withdrawn into the background. In the interior, the sky lobbies are open spaces over three floors, stacked one on top of the other. This particularly innovative device is actually an improvement on the first project inasmuch as it ensures an outdoor terrace on practically every floor. It ultimately makes the interior life of the tower more significant and radical than in the first version. The latter was undoubtedly more iconic, but in terms of space it was less innovative than the built version. We knew that the premises of Roche were going to grow but we did not know the extent and density that would be involved. The project as a whole generates an urban scale unprecedented in Switzerland. For one thing, a building will be constructed that is taller than the current tower. We have always advocated an increase in density along p. - the Rhine. This is exactly what the Roche project does, for which reason it is also very important to us. On studying the brochures that we had made on various Roche projects over the years, Pierre and I realized that we were losing control, that we were applying our own conventions without rethinking them in the context of the city. In our current collaboration with Roche, it was understood from the outset that the new buildings had to be perceived as an extension of the work begun by Otto Salvisberg. He designed the first master plan in the s, and his student Roland Rohn continued in that vein in the s. Salvisberg’s modernist traditionalism is the architectural foundation of Roche in Basel. The basic master plan, with its square blocks, is a given, but the density and height of the buildings, set to be constructed over the next ten years, is unique in Basel and, in fact, in Switzerland. The framework of the master plan is no longer adequate; architecture has to be designed that suits the scale of a metropolis; a new topography is being created that will emerge out of the center of the city. PdM: In the early s, the management of Roche asked us to develop a new master plan for the entire site and to define the location of

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KREIS K KREISVERKEHR "AUS- & EINBLICKE"

RASENFLÄCHE WEITERFÜHREN SOLITUDEPARK

MOORE SKULPTUR EINZELBÄUME

GRENZACHERSTRASSE

BAUMGRUPPEN

CAMPUS

SOLITUDE-PARK

BESTEH ENDE ALLEE

VORGARTEN

BAUMGRUPPEN

RHEINPROMENADE

: Enlargement of green space, plan from the urban planning study for the Roche Basel Site, Basel, ‒

: Sculpture by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Rock on Top of Another Rock (), on the forecourt of Roche Building 1, Roche Basel Site, Grenzacherstrasse, September  []

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 Building 1. One of the buildings was in bad repair and had to be torn down. We defined the south section “corporate” and the north section “pharma.” We took the entire area into account rather than focusing only on the Roche site. It seemed obvious that we had to work with the continuity of Solitude Park, which borders the street next to Museum Tinguely. The park now extends into the Roche site, where we have called it “Garden,” and to the street itself, which was broadened to make room for numerous plantings. We have tried to merge the public park and the street into one entity. At first, the client was reticent to invest in public space, and the cantonal architect, who preferred a classic lane with trees, was against the idea. p. -,  Grenzacherstrasse, which runs through the site, follows the course of the Rhine after the German border. Having crossed the major transEuropean north-south axis, it traverses the Roche site premises flanked by company buildings. Like Novartis, Roche could have asked to have the road integrated into the site and the traffic redirected. Instead, we suggested moving the boundaries of the grounds back several meters. The site remains closed for security reasons, but the three meters that were added to the street freed everything up. The buildings are now located in public space. This is a gesture of great significance. We persuaded the client to introduce small green islets. In addition, we noticed that there was an urban sequence accentuated by sculptures, to which we added substantially: the sculpture by Fischli/Weiss at the base of the tower, below the cantilever, responds to those by Jean Tinguely and Bernhard Luginbühl next to the Museum Tinguely, which in turn respond to those by Henry Moore and Hans Arp in the garden of the historical headquarters of Hoffmann-La Roche, visible from the street. The street becomes a path that crosses a park. This idea goes back to Building 92, our first contribution to the Roche p. - site in . We already realized back then that Grenzacherstrasse had the potential of being a public space that goes beyond its use as a street that cuts through the Roche site. Building 92 houses laboratories, a library, an auditorium, and the auditorium lobby; the plan was to place all of these elements inside the site. Instead, we suggested a kind of castling: using the rook, in this case the tower, to protect the king, as in chess! We then turned the communal spaces around to face the street, to give the building a lively, animated street front. JH: The city is the street, and the street is stores, restaurants, and bars, even in Switzerland, which is not the most urbane of countries. Twelve thousand people work at the Roche site; that’s the population of a small

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 town. The site of the other large pharmaceutical company, Novartis, includes an entire ensemble of facilities to meet the everyday needs of its employees: stores, dry cleaners, a dozen high-end restaurants. But the area is closed off. We wanted to put Roche in contact with the city by moving it closer to the street. Now the buildings themselves mark the border of the premises and the barriers around them have been eliminated. This simple gesture has restored the continuity between architecture and urban space. It is a sculptural gesture: the base of the statue has been removed so that it now stands on the terra firma of everyday life. PdM: From the beginning we also advocated preserving some of the existing buildings. Roche opposes having any buildings historically listed to prevent later intervention, but it has nonetheless adopted a policy of preserving certain historical layers in order to safeguard the company’s cultural identity. This aspect proved to be of great relevance in negotiating with the city about limiting and defining not only public spaces but also other urban and architectural elements of the project. JFC: We (Élia Pijollet and I) were deeply impressed with the project you completed in collaboration with Rémy Zaugg, which convinced us that color can have an extraordinary impact on the definition of an architectural space in terms of inside and outside, private and public. The building was open to the city even as it affirmed its spatial autonomy. This balance is vital for any architecture that must be a shelter, an inward-looking location, and an “urban element” (in the sense intended by Aldo Rossi), all at once. The museum is exemplary in this respect, which you demonstrate in the extension for the Musée p. -,  Unterlinden in Colmar: it is to be a showcase for Grünewald’s altarpiece and the accompanying collections, a space of transit connecting heterogeneous buildings that correspond to rather diverse layers of history, but also a redevelopment of the urban landscape that had been neglected in this area on the edge of the city’s historic center. Such projects, in which interaction with the urban environment is as important as the shape of the building itself, carry special conditions. You often say that the client’s role during the course of a project is decisive and that most of your good projects have benefited from dialogue with the client. p.  JH: A lot of these projects have become very visible: the Tate, Prada

Aoyama, the Dominus Winery… The clients were exacting and

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 insightful. In the case of Roche, it is the corporate culture that comes into play. In retrospect, the rejection of the first proposal for the tower project was self-evident. At any rate, the ideal relationship with a client does not mean carte blanche but rather radical experimentation that fruitfully exploits the knowledge of both parties. JFC: Hearing you explain it, it seems that the president of Roche was right to reject your first proposal for a spiral tower, because he was thinking about the logic of his business that ultimately corresponds to a desirable development approach to both the site and the city in general. You ultimately agreed with the president of Roche on an urban truth, just as you had with the mayor of Colmar. PdM: It was different in Colmar because the entente between architect and client was based on the decision of a jury in a public competition. In contrast, Roche was a commissioned project; that is, the management selected an architect rather than an anonymously submitted design. JH: The truth is there was a problem with the spiral tower project. The form was poorly developed, the building became swollen, and it ended up resembling a sausage! If it had been built like that, we would have had to invent a new spiral for the second tower, whereas p.  the current project for Building 2 will more simply and appropriately complement the Basel landscape: we will build a second, higher, tower that will relate to the current pyramid of Building 1. With the first project, we would have created a spectacular sculptural effect in the style of Shanghai, Abu Dhabi, or Dubai, but Basel, with its Protestant background, has a different history. The spectacular nature of the building would have pleased people, at least at the beginning, but it might also have been criticized for contradicting the spirit of the city. Who can tell? At any rate, the current project aims to create a new topography as much as a new image. In one sense it confirms our idea that cities are “specific” and certainly not “generic”—as claimed in the wake of globalization.1 JFC: In short, dialogue with the client can at times bring out a quality of the project specific to the situation and to the sociocultural conditions. The key concept of a project can come very quickly, but in the case of Roche the solution became evident in counter to the original plan, in keeping with a tradition and a knowledge inscribed in the landscape, in the geographic memory, of which the client was the conduit. But can

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Visualization showing the urban setting of the extension of Musée Unterlinden, Colmar (competition , project ‒, realization ‒)

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 we talk of a truth or an objective quality that depends on the genius loci of a place, which is imposed on the participants in a project? JH: We don’t let our buildings just stand for themselves alone, we talk about them; in other words, there is a “verbal” aspect to the architecture of Herzog & de Meuron, as demonstrated by numerous texts, conversations, essays, etc. We talk about what we do and we want others to talk about it too; we welcome open and impartial debate. We keep emphasizing the specifically physical aspect of architecture. But architecture is also intellectually informed in the sense that it produces thoughts and ideas that can be explained by the concrete reality of a project. The more you talk about it, the more elements and details you can discover that contribute to understanding and defining what we do, for instance by explaining and defining an idea, as we just did with respect to your suggestion of “opportunism.” The meanings of words are not fixed but you can try to pin them down when applied to a concrete project. It is more interesting to analyze projects in order to define words and concepts than the other way around. PdM: To clarify the question of objectivity, I would say that in the case of Roche common ground was indeed found. The president of Roche had always expressed the need for a rational approach: he wants to follow a chain of clear, comprehensible arguments that will lead him from A to Z, all the way to a solution. This is important to him, not only to assist in making decisions after shared consultations but also to enable him to provide information about the project and communicate it to others. He doesn’t want to impose subjective judgments. Similarly, we don’t want to make decisions based simply on a whim. Our decisions must have a rationale, which allows us to communicate them and, if need be, call them into question. JFC: In Colmar, the strength of the new building, with its hipped gable p. - roof, its brick cladding, the way in which it corresponds to the chapel, is an architectural invention. But the strength of the project is urban. When we visited the site in August , at the beginning of the competition, you immediately noted the importance of giving back to the museum the space occupied at the time by the bus station, of integrating a passage and a public space between the buildings. This aspect of the project shows an analogy with Roche. The urban quality of the project is closely related to formal invention and that explains the enthusiastic support of the client. A consonance with urban memory

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 is what I call objectivity or truth. The building is not only a morphological performance, it also unharnesses an urban force, and hence a collective force with which one can identify. JH: We are extremely interested in urban forces of that kind—often eclipsed in the long term by the consequences of transformation and change. That interest is demonstrated in projects dating from the p.  beginning of our career, for instance the Marktplatz in Basel of . This urban and architectural approach to the physical reality and energy of cities is diametrically opposed to the debate on the disappearance of “reality” that marked the s and s, especially in France. The Lyotard exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Les Immatériaux [The Immaterials], was terrific, but the transfer of these ideas to the architectural sphere had a devastating effect; many architects found themselves at an impasse. They thought they would be able to create a new kind of architecture without accepting its most basic and banal conditions: materials, reality, and weight, in short, its archaic nature. The / attacks brought all of that to an abrupt end. In one single, violent blow, we were once again made painfully aware of reality as such and the fragility of cities. JFC: That raises the question of risk. It is often said that architects are too quick to take action, that they take ill-considered risks and don’t pay enough attention to technical issues. The decision to build an underground gallery, under a canal, as you did in Colmar, could be deemed an ill-considered risk of that kind, which, incidentally, really displeased the Service des Musées de France. And it is indeed a risk: there is no  percent guarantee that the water will never enter. Even so, it is justified by the fact that the gallery is indispensable to the project and its urban significance. PdM: What you address is a risk that is very specific to Colmar. As I said, it was a competition. Our initial project proposed two entrances for the museum. But then it became clear that a single entrance was not negotiable. Naturally, we studied other possibilities, like a bridge across the street, but that would have impacted the public space on the new plaza. Finally we came up with the idea of linking the two parts of the museum underground, not as a mono-functional corridor but in the form of a gallery. The underground gallery meets the requirements of the program, which specifies that a link is indispensable to guarantee the economically and organizationally more practical

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 solution of only one entrance, one box office, and one cloakroom. While the project was under construction, the Logelbach canal flooded the underground gallery, a vexing incident with a beneficial side effect. It enabled us to evaluate the risk of flooding and work out possible solutions. In the process, we learned that the technical services of the city of Colmar had been unable to open and close the sluices. An electronic control system was actually in place but was out of order, causing the construction site to be flooded. To minimize the risk, we analyzed the situation, evaluated possible measures, and were able, in this way, to guarantee the best possible protection for the underground galleries and the works of art. JH: These are technical issues. They can largely be resolved, not by guaranteeing total security, but by keeping potential damage in check. Without maintenance, the water would eventually enter the gallery, but there would also be leaks in the roof of the chapel. There were once clear-cut, standardized solutions for these technical questions in the days when traditions were passed down by architects from generation to generation. There was little experimentation, little risk, but all the more knowledge and experience. A perfect world of architecture. It is a fabulous myth and, for the most part, it even corresponds to reality. In this ideal world, in this state of innocence, everything was based on technical, functional, and aesthetic experience; no one tried to do things differently. Industrialization and modernity produced a new type of artist and architect. Le Corbusier, Mies, and other protagonists of modernism broke with tradition. The quality of the architect, like that of the artist, was defined by the ability to be innovative, to be creative, to be different and specific, a tendency that has taken a pronounced radical turn over the past two decades. It is a logic that now seems to have run aground. For the past generation, no significant architects have emerged in the United States because the majority of young practitioners disappears into large firms. Rampant regulations and norms reduce “artistic freedom” to a minimum, while the risks and responsibilities of architectural offices have increased. The aim is zero risk and the process of innovation grinds to a halt. This marks both the end of innovation and of star architecture. Looking back on the pop, the sexual revolution, drugs, etc. of the s, everything was risk. Pierre and I benefited from the atmosphere, the freedom, but we were also aware of the limitations. Young people can no longer define themselves in this way, even if they wanted to.

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 The zeitgeist has arrested any willingness to take risks. Like the truth of the land, the cultural climate is also an indisputable reality. The tendency toward zero risk is a tricky issue and obstructs innovation. PdM: We have to distinguish between different kinds of risk. Some risks are hard to grasp at first, but once they are they can be controlled. For us that means developing an architectural concept without knowing the outcome. It is almost a condition of fruitful collaboration for clients to be prepared and capable of accepting this risk during the design phase. If they work with Herzog & de Meuron, they accept the open-ended process of working out a concept that makes it possible to uncover the surprising, unanticipated potential that basically lies in every project. I think there is more quality architecture in Basel than elsewhere because of the distinctive psychology here. Clients are prepared to take considerable but calculated risks; the chairman of p.  Actelion, for instance: he had no idea what kind of building he was going to move into. A bank or an insurance company would be less likely to assume that risk. To a certain extent, I think that explains the difference between Basel (a city of research) and Zurich (a city of banks and insurance companies). This is further illustrated by Hans Schmidt, who was active in both cities. In Zurich he built canopies to p. - protect the facades and windows; he did not do that in Basel, where he designed a clearer form. He was able to take a greater risk, presumably with the consent of the client. JFC: Capitalism in its current, neoliberal form generates risk on a massive scale through speculation, endless deregulation that kills work, and so on. But while bigwigs take those risks, which have considerable destructive impact on the community (though not, in the first instance, on themselves), we wish to stamp out even the slightest uncertainty: one must eliminate all accidents, meet standards, do everything by the book. The consequences are catastrophic in both cases. Where does the architect stand between these two extremes? JH: We are gravitating toward an increasingly conventional and standardized world. Risk is in decline. Those who assume maximum risk through speculation—the banks and the insurance companies—are the same ones who want to eliminate risk in the arts and society. The world of finance represents a huge destructive danger, but it is in large part virtual and dematerialized. The world of architecture is archaic, physical. This is the world we live in, but the conditions are



 defined by the laws of global capitalism: there is no one to turn to. The situation caused by globalization is out of control. It is a Pandora’s Box. PdM: The worst thing about risk is not being aware of it. However, once you are, you can evaluate its extent and work out necessary measures to keep it in check. Regarding modes of construction and details, the use and durability of materials are an important consideration. How do you proceed to ensure that a building in a particular city or a particular country is best suited to its purpose, its users, and the local environmental conditions? The damage quota is extremely small for projects built by Herzog & de Meuron. We obviously have insurance for certain contingencies, but not for going over budget or past deadline. Fortunately, we have rarely had to file any claims, so that we have even had refunds and our rates are quite low for our field. It’s just an administrative point but it’s significant. Ordinarily we do a lot of preliminary testing; we build prototypes and p. - full-scale models. For the last Ricola project, we used rammed earth as a construction material, which is unusual for a building of that size. We had already planned to do so for the Schaulager, but at the time we felt the risk was too great. In this case, we did take the risk but only after a number of full-scale tests and by enlisting the best possible professional support and outside expertise. As mentioned above, there are different kinds of risk. Risk can also apply to the choice of form: you have to be aware of it, take it into account, and accept it. If you follow your own taste and personal preferences, it will probably not take long for the building to age and be outmoded. Individually, you have to take a critical approach, but processes of collective evaluation are also required. JFC: In , in the course of one of our conversations, Jacques made a remarkable comment that attracted a lot of attention: “It is difficult for us to say, ‘That’s the form I want, no doubt about it.’ Ornament has helped us overcome the obstacle of form. When we discovered Arab architecture, we soon realized that it was a means of overcoming or even suppressing form. Ornament plays with doubt.” Overcoming the obstacle of form: there’s an ambiguity in that statement that I didn’t understand at the time. What it means is “overcoming the difficulty of defining form” or “overcoming the obsession of form.” JH: The two meanings coexist. Sometimes it really is hard for us to decide on a form, definitively, once and for all. Very often in a project



 Lincoln Road, Miami: car park, retail and private residence (project ‒, realization ‒)



 there’s something about the surface or the structure that bothers us and that helps to define the external form, but it also generates a certain indeterminacy. Going into “depth” in experimenting with a surface is something that we started doing in our very first projects. In the purer forms that have emerged more recently (Miami, Beijing, the stadium in Bordeaux, Novartis, Ricola, and so on), surface, space, structure, p.  and ornament are one and the same thing. Every element is structural, contributes to defining the space, and can be perceived as an ornamental part of the whole. JFC: I think that today good architects, as indeed good artists, think twice about adding new objects to the world. But they do it anyway because they have to, out of personal necessity. There is thus a fundamental tension here. PdM: We can take the example of our recent project for Vitra, the p.  Schaudepot. Initially, Rolf Fehlbaum said he didn’t want a symbolic, iconic building, defined by its form. He wanted an invisible project. Our first thought was to build something underground, then we considered prefabricated architecture without an author, as it were. This forced us to think about invisibility. You can’t do nothing: if you need four walls and a roof, they must have an expression; you have to give them a form. We proposed an archetype, a fundamental form of architecture: four walls, a gabled roof. The choice of material—broken brick—and the way it is applied define both structure and ornament. Had we used corrugated iron, the building would be completely different. JH: Le Corbusier was a painter, sculptor, and architect. It is said that he dedicated his mornings to the drawing table. This produced Ronchamp, Chandigarh, and La Tourette: the architect as a creator of form. I think it is difficult to work like that today. So then what? We realized from the beginning, even with the Blue House, that resorting p.  to an archetype can be an excuse: you don’t have to worry about form. That was a discovery for us. I often say that we are conceptual architects: form is invariably a consequence of the concept and not of the need to carve or chisel. It is reflection that generates the form. But I don’t rule out the activity of the sculptor who cuts, shapes, assembles. Sometimes it is interesting to reverse the process. If you use a pure pyramid or a pure sphere, you are presenting a very strong form, with a strong symbolic character, but you’re not the author: you have decided to use that shape, but you haven’t created it. The project for



New Stade de Bordeaux (competition ‒, project ‒, realization ‒)



 the Serpentine Pavilion in London was based on archeology; it was an excuse to not create a form. JFC: This reticence with regard to form and formal invention is practically a law of modern art. It is Duchamp’s response to Picasso. Mallarmé had earlier written, “Nature exists, and cannot be added to; apart from cities, railway lines, and several inventions of our making.”2 Since the end of the nineteenth century there has been a fundamental tension within modernism between the reticence to add anything to the existing world and the enduring need to produce new objects (if only new equipment, as Mallarmé says). In the field of architecture, the anthropological necessity is probably that of shelter. Shelter becomes a house, and, as you yourselves have shown, even the simplest form of a house is an architectural argument. JH: The architect practically always adds something. We learned about the environmental idea of “the smallest possible intervention” from the sociologist Lucius Burckhardt, who was our professor in Zurich in ‒. Burckhardt was radical; he was a very political thinker. We were both fascinated and repelled. We are acutely aware of how much we benefited in our studies from two diametrically opposed philosophies: Lucius Burckhardt and Aldo Rossi. Over the years, this conflict of ideas has proven extremely productive. JFC: The thought that it is absurd to keep adding things to our planet, things that are destructive, is becoming increasingly important. Congestion is a major risk; one need only think of the storage of nuclear waste. If you think of nature as a dynamic force, you can observe how humankind is trying to oppose it. PdM: But a volcano is also a destructive force, and tectonic shifts, too. JFC: Sade used the volcano as a metaphor for the human capacity to destroy, which he held up in opposition to the Enlightenment. But this destructive capacity is positive. Destruction can no doubt be a vital factor in the creative process, but that is different from destruction carried out by those who think in terms of addition and accumulation. What is destructive today is blind accumulation without even looking to destroy. But I would like to return to this tension that, to me, is such a fundamental aspect of modern times. Duchamp versus Picasso. Starting there, how does this tension function for you today, concretely? You



 now have a much greater capacity for bringing new things into the world, to the point where you can change what your native city looks like. JH: The visibility of a building like the Roche tower was a great responsibility. Now we know that it works. I honestly would have preferred to transform the city by developing it horizontally, to the north, with new neighborhoods. This will happen someday; I would have liked to make more change in this direction, but the democratic decision-making p. - process is very slow. To the south, in the Dreispitz area, we have generated possibilities for horizontal urban development. The Roche tower is different in that the verticality of the tower is a solution to a concrete problem, that of a company that has a great need for expansion but wants to stay in the same location. The project is a clear-cut manifestation of this fact. JFC: You wrote that New York and Venice are cities that have become landscape. This is what you are doing in Basel with these two projects: you are creating the city as landscape; strong forms produce the landscape that ultimately absorbs them. The Messe, the trade fair building, is a new dynamic element in the urban landscape. Seen from the p. - Clarastrasse, it seems to cross the city, as a continuous line. It’s an apparition, an imaginary form, almost hallucinatory. JH: I think that may have contributed to the acceptance of the unusual p. - size of the building. It’s not static and heavy, it’s more like a train passing by on the German railroad tracks that used to run through the site. It’s not an object that is dramatically pitted against its background; it’s not p. -, , an object sitting in the landscape but rather both form and landscape - at once. It’s a new piece of urban landscape. p. , - JFC: It seems to me that something similar is going on in Dreispitz.

The building is very surprising. It is a carved block with an immense pedestal housing the firm’s archives. Though the form is strong, contradicting many of the preexisting elements of the site, it is not aggressive. Why? p. -, PdM: It is a district of warehouses, of freight, of commerce. The scale - is completely different from that of a traditional neighborhood that

combines housing, offices, and shops. It’s a site of heavy loads and freight trains. The building unites two worlds: an industrial, logistical



 world and a domestic, residential world. We have demonstrated that this is possible, and we are betting on the fact that the neighborhood will continue to expand in this way. The use of concrete might have seemed aggressive, but it isn’t. I think that is partially due to the curve, which was suggested by the shape of the plot. JFC: The building gives the appearance of a pedestal on which something has been placed: it’s not a blind object that is just there, like a sculpture by Tony Smith. It has a figurative dimension, somewhat like a mirror image of the expansive landscape around it. And it makes you wonder what’s inside that pedestal, all the more so because it’s in a warehouse district. It can’t be an ordinary warehouse, but it doesn’t look like apartments either. This enigma, the question of the interior, humanizes the relationship to the building. As with the Messe, it is ultimately an example of a very assertive form that dissolves into the landscape. PdM: The pedestal is not a completely solid wall; there are some windows that create a relationship between interior and exterior and prevent the building from becoming too imposing or monumental. When you try to photograph or sketch the building, there are distortions that are difficult to figure out. The cage of the upper section, if one can call it that, has a different geometry from the base. It is there that the curve comes into play, especially in how it combines with the slope of the south and north facades. JFC: But all of these remarks bring us back to the issue of housing. You p. - studied social architecture of the s and s, especially in Basel. The goal was to make (quality) architecture for everyone. Pierre refurbished a Hans Schmidt house and lived in it. But you don’t build social p. - housing. Why? JH: Social housing has been sequestered by investors. The specifications of the commission we were given in  for social housing on the Rue des Suisses in Paris were closely related to those of the s and s, which gave us a certain leeway in designing a really attractive and affordable place to live in the middle of Paris. Investors are ordinarily only interested in high-end residential towers because they use the architect’s name to sell luxury products. Social housing concerns people who don’t have any money. We have been thrust into a world of iconic architecture. Iconic architecture reflects the growing

p. , 



Arena do Morro, center for sports, leisure and cultural acitivities, Mãe Luíza, Natal, Brazil (project ‒, realization ‒)



 importance of the investor as the main player in global architectural production. We are, however, currently working on several small housing projects, for instance, a block of apartments for middle-income residents in a park in Uster, near Zurich. The project is in the hands of a single private investor, a framework that allows for a lot of creativity. PdM: This is also related to the question of risk and innovation. Innovation is practically nonexistent in social housing, especially here in Switzerland, where there are no quotas as in the United Kingdom, for instance. Most moderately priced apartments in Basel are found in buildings from the nineteenth century, so there is no purpose-built social housing here. Besides, social housing is fully regulated, especially in France, but in other countries as well: the doors, the ceiling height, the number of showers and toilets, everything is specified, fixed, so there is no wiggle room. JFC: So you can’t inherit what’s gone before. You can look at this architecture or live in it, as Pierre has, or you can study it closely, but there is a break with the past. It’s sad. p.  PdM: In Natal, a city in northern Brazil, we built a gym in the middle of a favela in collaboration with a Swiss foundation. It’s a place where people can meet and engage in exchange. It’s true, we do not actively seek out social projects; we could be criticized for that. But if we were asked to develop social housing, under similar circumstances, we would certainly accept.

JFC: In urban terms, this is largely a question of combining density and lacunae. I am talking about creating breathing spaces, openings, of breaking down barriers. To compensate for the lack of social architecture, we could create social space, holes in the urban fabric, open spaces, spaces without a name. I am thinking, for example, of the Voltaplatz, not far from your office, which is a very lively area, between a slightly rundown neighborhood and the Novartis campus. PdM: It is remarkable that this square has attracted your attention, and I agree with you that, no matter how great a city’s density, it’s important to ensure the survival of undefined locations to which no function has been assigned.



Voltaplatz, Basel, June  []



 JFC: This corresponds to a theme of opened and closed, inside and outside, which is omnipresent in your architecture and which, it seems to me, merges with the model of nature. You first interpreted the model of the crystalized form, reminiscent of Beuys’s romantic inspiration, but you couple that with your exploration of surfaces. You treat them like skin, which is more like a painting. But the skin is not simply a surface placed on top of an interior; it qualifies the site as a place of shelter and presumes a dialogue with the interior. JH: Inside and outside were already closely aligned in the stone house in Liguria. Unfortunately, we have hardly any photographs of the interior. The four-part composition of the rooms with no hallways mirrors the outside. The interior of the Blue House is also very precise, like a piece of furniture. We have always been aware that the interior is as interesting and important as the exterior, but it was only later that we had the opportunity to act on that realization. It’s true that we are known for our work on surfaces, and I don’t deny that we have at times focused on the exterior. The building that is truly spectacular in this respect is the first storage building for Ricola. We didn’t have access to the interior; it is completely automated with the industrial machinery and inner workings specified by the engineers. But we discovered the incredible quality of the site and understood that we could invent a new space on the outside, between the rock and the building. Our job was to design the exterior, the shell, which is more than a simple skin; it’s a minimalist sculpture. I don’t remember at what point we realized that the space we wanted to create was not inside but outside. It was the distance between the warehouse and the cliff wall. As a result we were able to create a space that everyone could experience without entering the building.

p. -

p. -

p. 

p. -

PdM: In the medieval or classical city, building exteriors, the facades, contribute to defining the spaces “inside” the cities: the streets and squares. As a rule, we prefer these traditional spaces to open spaces that go in all directions. JFC: It’s hard for human beings to think of themselves moving in space and also think at the same time that the body possesses an interior space. Architecture works in both registers.



Turbine Hall, entrance hall of the Tate Modern, London (competition ‒, project ‒, realization ‒)



 JH: That’s why architecture is an art form that also interests artists, especially in contrast to sculpture, which does not traditionally contain space. You mentioned the Voltaplatz, a square that is difficult to define and that is actually distinguished in part by its indefinition. But I am sure one could produce the same effect with a more traditionally defined urban space. The beautiful, old squares in city centers are often lifeless or ruined by ugly facilities and design elements. So far we have hardly intervened in the historic center of Basel. For several months, we’ve been working on a project close to our hearts because it is located on the Barfüsserplatz, in the city center, which is the site we had chosen for our architecture degree project in . The project for the Stadtcasino, a concert hall built in the nineteenth century, involves both destruction and simulation. It will create unexpected spaces and be a source of new urban potential, revealing parts of the city that have long been invisible. This urban gesture might be compared to the steps undertaken for the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar.

 p. 

p. -

p. -

PdM: The first gesture is to relocate the entrance of the concert hall so that it faces the square instead of the adjoining street, as it does now. The layout is little bit like that at Roche, where the entrance and the lively, populated places face the street. JFC: You work on very different scales. Interiors are generally associated with intimacy. But at the Tate Modern you created an immense, monumental interior that matches the impact of the building within the rather chaotic landscape along the banks of the Thames. JH: The Tate Modern project was decisive for us inasmuch as it made us work entirely within the scale of the city. The real quality of the project lies in having created an indoor space of urban dimensions, the Turbine Hall, which was not originally planned in the competition brief. We decided to hollow it out, to expose it completely, to let it be what it is, and to use it as a vast entrance hall, which would also be the first exhibition space. The Tate Modern project made us realize that superficial cosmetics cannot possibly do justice to a monument of such visibility and urban significance. It was a project that compelled the architects to take a radical and precise stand, somewhat like a surgeon before an incisive operation. The Turbine Hall proved to be a bold gesture, and we did



 not realize at first that it would have such consequences. In another city, the space would have been inappropriate and disproportionate. This was also an extremely important experience because it enabled us to understand how different cities are—proof again of our thesis that cities are specific and not generic.

1

Roger Diener, Jacques Herzog, Marcel Meili, Pierre de Meuron, Manuel Herz, Christian Schmid, and Milica Topalovic, The Inevitable Specificity of Cities, ed. ETH Studio Basel (Zurich, Lars Müller Publishers, ).

2

Stephane Mallarmé, “Music and Literature” (), trans. Rosemary Lloyd, in Mallarmé in Prose, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York: New Directions, ), p. .



Jetzt Du Hier [now / you / here], /, work of art by Rémy Zaugg in the meeting room used by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Basel, June  []



: Cover: View of Basel from the Asklepios 8 building (‒), Novartis Campus, March . Photo: © George Dupin. Front endpaper: Map of the Trinational Agglomeration Basel: Eidgenössisches Departement für Verteidigung, Bevölkerungsschutz und Sport VBS, Bundesamt für Landestopografie swisstopo. Back endpaper: Facade of the TEA (Tenerife Espacio de las Artes) on the Avenida de San Sebastián, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands (project ‒, realization ‒). Photo: © Iwan Baan. With the exception of those listed below, all of the photographs have been taken by George Dupin specially for this publication. © George Dupin. Every effort has been made to identify and acknowledge all rights holders. In the event of any errors or omissions, the holders are kindly requested to contact the authors. p. , ,  below, ,  below, , -, , , -, , , ,  above, : © Herzog & de Meuron; p. : ©  Mark Darley; p.  above,  above,  below, , , -, , , -, , , , , : © Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron Kabinett (Foundation); p.  below,  below,  below, : © Iwan Baan; p.  above: © Hufton+Crow; p. , , , , , , , -, : Photos Margherita Spiluttini © Architekturzentrum Wien, Sammlung; p.  above: © Thomas Ruff; p. : © Duccio Malagamba, Barcelona; p. , , -,  below, , ,  above: © Jean-François Chevrier and Élia Pijollet; p. -: © Bau- und Verkehrsdepartement des Kantons BaselStadt; p. ,  below,  above, , , , , , -,  below, , -,  below: © Pierre de Meuron; p.  above,  below: © Kunstmuseum Basel; p.  below: © Peter Stöckli; p.  above, : © Kurt Wyss, Nadelberg A,  Basel, Switzerland; p. : © bpk / Kupferstichkabinett, SMB / Jörg P. Anders; p. : © Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett, Photo: Herzog & de Meuron; p. : © Estate of Rémy Zaugg; p. -: © Erich Meyer; p.  above: © ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Bildarchiv/Siftung Luftbild Schweiz / Photo: Friedli, Werner; p.  below: © gta Archiv / ETH Zürich, Nachlass Ernst F. und Elsa BurckhardtBlum; p. ,  above,  above: © gta Archiv / ETH Zürich, Nachlass Hans Schmidt; p. : © gta Archiv / ETH Zürich; p.  below,  below: © Martin Gasser; p.  above: © gta Archiv / ETH Zürich, Nachlass Sigfried Giedion; p.  above: © Kantonale Denkmalpflege Basel-Stadt, Photo: Bruno Thüring, ; p.  below: © Arthur Rüegg; p. : © Hisao Suzuki; p.  above: © Hufton+Crow and MBEACH1, LLLP; p.  below: © , Iwan Baan and MBEACH1, LLLP; p.  above: © Francis Vigouroux; p. -, : Rights reserved.



005

318

094

133

128

165

008

019

031

032

J

038

053

369

025

029

140

046 362

005 Blue House, Oberwil (project 1979, realization 1979–1980) 008 Apartment Extension, Laufen (realization 1980) 014 Frei Photographic Studio, Weil am Rhein (project 1981, realization 1981–1982) 019 Conversion of Offices for Ricola, Laufen (realization 1983) 025 Apartment and Commercial Building Schützenmattstrasse (competition 1984–1985, project 1991, realization 1992–1993) 027 Plywood House, Bottmingen (project 1984, realization 1985) 029 Apartment Building along a Party Wall, Hebelstrasse (competition 1984, realization 1987–1988) 031 Apartment and Office Building Schwitter (competition 1985, project 1985, realization 1987–1988) 032 Conversion and Renovation of a Building in the Historic Centre, Laufen (project 1985, realization 1986) 034 House for an Art Collector, Therwil (project 1985, realization 1986) 035 E, D, E, N, Pavilion, Hotel Eden, Rheinfelden (competition 1986, realization 1987) 038 Ricola Storage Building, Laufen (project 1986, realization 1987) 039 Conversion and Renovation of Two Houses (project 1986, realization 1987) 045 Refurbishment of the Gaba Block (various projects: 1982, 1983, 1985, 1988) 048 Railway Engine Depot Auf dem Wolf (project 1989, realization 1991–1995) 049 Signal Box Auf dem Wolf (project 1989, realization 1991–1994) 050 SUVA House, Extension and Alteration of an Apartment and Office Building (project 1988–1990, realization 1991–1993) 053 Ricola Factory Addition and Glazed Canopy, Laufen (project 1989, realization 1989–1991) 055 Pfaffenholz Sports Centre, Saint-Louis (project 1989–1990, realization 1992–1993) 094 Ricola Europe SA, Production and Storage Building, MulhouseBrunstatt (project 1992, realization 1993) 096 Koechlin House, Riehen (realization 1993–1994) 100 Roche Building 92, Roche Basel Site (project 1993–1995, realization 1998–2000) 113 Landolt House, Riehen (project 1994, realization 1994)

The numbers correspond to the chronological complete works list of the practice.

A

154

Buildings and projects by Herzog & de Meuron in the Basel region

284

055

Agglomeration of Basel

F

034

402

G

200

D

214

E

I

H

050

379

419

131

213

119

225

289

049

L

169

345

Q

312

048

100

O

148

119 Central Signal Box (competition 1994, project 1995, realization 1998–1999) 128 House in Leymen (project 1996, realization 1997) 131 Cartoonmuseum Basel, Conversion and New Building (project 1994, realization 1994–1996) 132 Institute for Hospital Pharmaceuticals, Rossettiareal (project 1995, realization 1997–1998) 133 Studio Rémy Zaugg, Mulhouse (project 1995, realization 1995–1996) 140 Satellite Signal Box (project 1995–1996, realization 1998–1999) 148 St. Jakob-Park, Football Stadium, Commercial Centre and Residence for the Elderly (project 1996, 1998, realization 1998–2002) 154 Ricola Marketing Building, Laufen (project 1997, realization 1998–1999) 165 REHAB Basel, Centre for Spinal Cord and Brain Injuries (competition 1998, project 1998–1999, realization 1999–2002) 169 Schaulager, Laurenz Foundation, Basel/Münchenstein (project 1998–1999, realization 2000–2003) 180 Elsässertor II, Office and Commercial Building (project 2000, realization 2002–2005) 193 St. Johanns-Vorstadt, Office Conversion (project 2001, realization 2002) 195 St. Johanns-Rheinweg, Apartment and Office Building (project 2001–2007, realization 2005–2007) 200 Museum der Kulturen (project 2001–2010, realization 2008–2010) 213 Messe Basel – New Hall (project 2004–2012, realization 2010–2013) 214 Südpark Baufeld D (competition 2002, project 2004–2011, realization 2008–2012) 225 Roche Building 95, Roche Basel Site (project 2003–2005, realization 2004–2006) 245 St. Jakob Tower (project 2003–2005, realization 2006–2008) 284 Actelion Business Center, Allschwil (project 2005–2009, realization 2007–2010) 289 Roche Building 97, Roche Basel Site (project 2006–2008, realization 2008–2011) 294 VitraHaus, Vitra Campus, Weil am Rhein (project 2006–2009, realization 2007–2009) 312 Helsinki Dreispitz, Münchenstein (project 2007–2013, realization 2012–2014) 318 Actelion Research and Laboratory Building, Allschwil (project 2007–2010, realization 2009–2013)

027

418

180

039

132

193

195

045

K

014

417

294

S

N

319

096

Church of St. Margarethen, Binningen hill Church of St. Chrischona, Bettingen Church of St. Ottilia, Tüllinger hill Mittlere Brücke [middle bridge] Basel Minster [cathedral] Marktplatz [market square] Barfüsserplatz Erasmus House Kunstmuseum Basel St. Anthony’s Church (K. Moser, 1925–1927) Silo tower (arch. H. Bernoulli, 1923) Badischer Bahnhof [German railway station] (arch. K. Moser, 1913) M Dam and hydroelectric power plant, Birsfelden (arch. H. Hofmann, 1953-1954) N Garden city Freidorf, Muttenz (arch. H. Meyer, 1919–1921) O Garden city Im Vogelsang (arch. H. Bernoulli, 1926) P Schaeffer House (arch. P. Artaria, H. Schmidt, 1928) Q Housing development Schorenmatten (arch. H. Schmidt, 1927–1929) R Housing development Zu den Drei Linden (arch. O. Meier, 1944) S Goetheanum, Dornach (arch. R. Steiner, 1925–1928)

A B C D E F G H I J K L

Key places and buildings referred to in the book

B

P

035

319 Naturbad Riehen, Natural Swimming Pool (project 2007–2008, realization 2010–2014) 345 Roche Building 1, Roche Basel Site (project 2009–2011, realization 2011–2015) 362 Asklepios 8, An Office Building on the Novartis Campus (project 2010–2015, realization 2012–2015) 369 Ricola Kräuterzentrum, Laufen (project 2010–2013, realization 2013–2014) 379 Volkshaus Basel, Bar, Brasserie (project 2011, realization 2011–2012) 402 Extension of the Stadtcasino (project 2012, planned completion 2019) 417 Vitra Schaudepot, Vitra Campus, Weil am Rhein (project 2013, realization 2014–2016) 418 Meret Oppenheim Tower (competition 2002, project 2013– ) 419 Helvetia Campus Basel (project 2013– )

245

M

R

C

113