From Basel - Herzog & de Meuron

From Basel Herzog & de Meuron Jean-François Chevrier

Birkhäuser

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

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a period of some ten years, both unpublished and published in the journal El Croquis in  and .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

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: 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 

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 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.

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

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  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,



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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BA GB PB BB SB

Ballon d’Alsace / Alsatian Belchen SSW Grand Ballon / Great Belchen WSW Petit Ballon / Little Belchen TNG Badischer Belchen / Black Forest Belchen Schweizer Belchen / Swiss Belchen

Sommersonnenwende / Summer solstice Wintersonnenwende / Winter solstice Tagundnachtgleiche / Equinox

The line of the Celtic road, crossing the oppidum (red zone marked O) on the Minster hill (MĂźnsterhĂźgel), runs almost at right angles to the solar axis at the summer solstice (marked SSW). The Minster and the chapels of St. Johann and St. Ulrich, on each side of the Minster hill, are positioned with regard to this axis. The same axes govern the street layout of Augusta Raurica, the oldest Roman town on the Upper Rhine, which lies 10 km to the east of Basel.

The ancient road that crosses the oppidum of Basel continues through the Gallic settlement (red zone marked K); it formed the backbone of the St. Johann quarter in the lower town and is the main road to Alsace. It runs almost parallel to the line between the Swiss Belchen (SB) and the Little Belchen (PB) (see plan on p. 71).

Sketches by Pierre de Meuron, October ďœ˛ďœ°ďœąďœľ. ď?Ąď?˘ď?Żď?śď?Ľ: Diagram of the Belchensystem, map of the Basel region; ď?Żď?°ď?°ď?Żď?łď?Šď?´ď?Ľ: The Belchensystem overlaid on the plan of central Basel

ďœľďœ´

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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 )

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

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

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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. [...] ďœąďœłďœ´

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

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

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 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

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

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 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.

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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

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 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. .

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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  []

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