Practice Base, Basel

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. 03. Previous page: Practice theory lineage timeline Fig. 09. Below: Some key practice projects, key museum projects highlighted in a timeline Fig. 04. Top left: Aldo Rossi Fig. 05. Middle left: Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown Fig. 06. Bottom left: Jacques Derrida Fig. 07. Top right: Jacques Herzog, Pierre De Meuron Fig. 08. Bottom right: Friedrich Nietzsche

1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020

1978 Jacques and Pierre form the Practice Herzog & De Meuron Blue House, Oberwil, Switzerland Residential Stone House, Tavole, Italy Residential Factory Ricola Factory Addition and Glazed Canopy, Laufen, Switzerland Ricola-Euope SA Production and Storage Building, Mulhouse-Brunstatt , France Goetz Collection, Munich, Germany Museum Factory Residential Dominus Winery, Yountville California, USA Central Signal Prada Boutique Aoyama, Tokyo, Japan IKMZ der BTU Cottbus, Library at Brandenburg University of Technology (BTU), Cottbus, Allianz Arena, München-Fröttmaning , Germany 1111 Lincoln Road (parking garage), Miami, USA Parrish Art Museum, Long Island, New York Elbphilharmonie concert hall, Hamburg, Germany Tate Modern, Switch House, London, UK Roche Pharma Research Institute Building, Basel, Switzerland Laban Dance Centre, London, UK MuseumMuseum Stadium StadiumServices Office Winery Education Retail Mixed Use Theatre Library Caixa Forum, Madrid, Spain Museum Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford, UK Education Rudin House, Leymen, France Tower, Basel, Germany, Grand Stade de 5 Davidovici, I, Forms of Practice, German-Swiss Architecture, Zurich, Gta-Verlag, 2014, p.15. Switzerland Apartment buildings, Rue des Suisses, Paris, France Edifici Fòrum, Barcelona, SpainResidential Museum Museum Stadium Beijing National Stadium, Beijing, China Museum Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France Unterlinden Museum Extension, Colmar, France 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 Museum Tate Modern, London, UK Museum M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, California, USA Pavilion Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, Residential 56 Leonard Street Projects. Tokyo, TN Probe, 1997, p.5. Walker Art Center Kensington (“Jenga Tower”), 10 ibid, p.7. 11 ibid. expansion, Minneapolis, USA Gardens, London, UK New York City, USA