PRACTICE LINEAGE
HERZOG & DE MEURON
SWISS, NORTHERN EUROPEAN THEORY The attitudes of Swiss architecture are framed by 1970’s theoretical discourse, specifically ETHZ, the neo-rationalism of Aldo Rossi and the neo-realism of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.5 From 1970 to 1975, both Jacques Herzog and Pierre De Meuron studied under Aldo Rossi and Dolph Schnebli at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ). Three years after qualifying, the pair started Herzog & de Meuron, in Basel. Where Kenneth Frampton sees Swiss architecture as a clear and defined meaning, as a “basic minimalist parti pris”,6 Irina Davidovici argues that this is solely based on aesthetics, and proposes for the validity of shared circumstances in which aesthetics became common part of assessment, in a wider cultural, professional and theoretical context, as a cultural phenomenon.7 Concerned with buildings as physical embodiments of a concept, physical presence and effect, in the aspiration of architecture of simply ‘being.’8 One could argue that the practice is emphatically non-stylistic, nor appearing to be high-tech, nor postmodern, nor deconstructivist, but contemporary and archaic, somewhat timeless.9 There are many inspirations for the practice, of whom Jacques Herzog a former artist, like 1970’s Deconstructivists Foucalt and Derrida, who explored breaking down vocabulary and language into meaning, to artists like Giacometti who used humans in the study of space, to their hometown of Basel. The partners use their will to build to establish architectural syntax, from sketch to site, the practice is founded on a gestural practicality.10 Like Friedrich Nietzsche, a previous Basel University Professor of Greek in the 1870’s, Herzog & de Meuron seem to point to pre-Victorian values of body in architecture, suspicious of complicated art, form and content being equal. Like Ancient Greeks, their architecture originates in a primal gestural move, marking the site, using contemporary movements like modernism and minimalism by experimenting with methods to expand on primal forms like the shed or the box.11 It is this unique sense of an innate understanding to history and processes which fascinates myself as an architecture student, in an overly commercialised, homogenous urban landscape with a vast disregard to context.
Fig. 04. Top left: Aldo Rossi Fig. 05. Middle left: Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown Fig. 06. Bottom left: Jacques Derrida
Fig. 03. Previous page: Practice theory lineage timeline Fig. 09. Below: Some key practice projects, key museum projects highlighted in a timeline
2020
Theatre Stadium Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, Kensington Gardens, London, UK
Residential
Museum
Stadium
Walker Art Center expansion, Minneapolis, USA
Unterlinden Museum Extension, Colmar, France
Pavilion
Museum
Beijing National Stadium, Beijing, China
M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, California, USA
HERZOG & DE MEURON MUSEÉ UNTERLINDEN
1111 Lincoln Road (parking garage), Miami, USA
Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford, UK
Grand Stade de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France
Museum
Tate Modern, London, UK
Education
Library
Mixed Use
Office Apartment buildings, Rue des Suisses, Paris, France
Tate Modern, Switch House, London, UK
Elbphilharmonie concert hall, Hamburg, Germany
Allianz Arena, München-Fröttmaning , Germany
Edifici Fòrum, Barcelona, Spain
Museum
Residential
Museum
Museum Museum
Caixa Forum, Madrid, Spain
IKMZ der BTU Cottbus, Library at Brandenburg University of Technology (BTU), Cottbus, Germany,
Services
Museum
Parrish Art Museum, Long Island, New York
Stadium
Laban Dance Centre, London, UK
Roche Pharma Research Institute Building, Basel, Switzerland
Central Signal Tower, Basel, Switzerland
DH JAMES CLARK
2015
Retail Dominus Winery, Yountville California, USA
Stone House, Tavole, Italy
5 Davidovici, I, Forms of Practice, German-Swiss Architecture, Zurich, Gta-Verlag, 2014, p.15. 6 Frampton, K, Minimal Moralia: Reflections on Recent Swiss German Production, Cambridge, Scroope Cambridge Architecture Journal, 1996, p.326. 7 Davidovici, I, Forms of Practice, German-Swiss Architecture, Zurich, Gta-Verlag, 2014, p.14. 8 Zumthor, P, Thinking Architecture, Basel, Birkhauser Verlag, 2006, p.16-17. 9 Herzog & de Meuron, Urban Projects. Collaboration with Artists. Three Current Projects. Tokyo, TN Probe, 1997, p.5. 10 ibid, p.7. 11 ibid.
2010
Prada Boutique Aoyama, Tokyo, Japan
Rudin House, Leymen, France
Ricola-Euope SA Production and Storage Building, Mulhouse-Brunstatt , France
Goetz Collection, Munich, Germany
2005
Education
Ricola Factory Addition and Glazed Canopy, Laufen, Switzerland
2000
Museum
Residential
1995
Winery
1990
Blue House, Oberwil, Switzerland
Residential
Residential
1978 Jacques and Pierre form the Practice Herzog & De Meuron
1985
Factory
1980
Factory
1975
Fig. 07. Top right: Jacques Herzog, Pierre De Meuron Fig. 08. Bottom right: Friedrich Nietzsche
56 Leonard Street (“Jenga Tower”), New York City, USA
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