tects teach not only at Harvard and other international institutions but, true to their roots, they also run a subsidiary of the ETH Zurich, the ETH Studio Basel, in collaboration with Roger Diener and Marcel Meili. This territorial rootedness is the point of departure for designs they have created all over the world. Currently 446 projects are listed on their website, the most recent one related to Expo 2015 in Milan. The extension to the museum Unterlinden in nearby Colmar is scheduled to open in December 2015. The impetus starts in Basel and forms concentric circles that extend – metaphorically speaking – from Colmar and Denmark to Mexico, Hong Kong and Beijing. The deliberate focus on local roots is an enrichment for the architects in studying and interpreting the specifities of other locations. They do not cultivate a distinctive signature or a ‘style’, nor do they confine themselves to particular genres or materials as do many other architectural offices. Their approach is fundamentally conceptual. They are open and receptive to the potential of digitalization, but not uncritical. In this respect, they often quote Mies van der Rohe, who is supposed to have commented that technology would never allow such nonsense. In their opinion, digitalization also makes it possible to convert too much ‘nonsense’ into reality. Herzog & de Meuron have designed over 25 projects and buildings in Basel and vicinity, which generate new forms of perception and have garnered international acclaim: signal boxes for the Swiss railway, the Elsässertor office building, several projects for Ricola in Laufen and Alsace, the Schaulager in Münchenstein, the above-mentioned Roche Building 1 and the VitraHaus in Weil am Rhein, all commissioned by internationally renowned clients. Dealing with Their Own Histor y
For the Dreispitz, an urban site near the Schaulager in Münchenstein, the architects drafted a master plan and designed a building that includes several floors to accommodate their own archives: the ‘Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron Cabinet’. Their concept recalls Maja Oeri’s Schaulager, created for the important collection of the Emanuel Hoffmann-Foundation. The overriding objective was to find a means of storing works so that they might still be seen and studied rather than being packed away in boxes or in an inaccessible warehouse. The cabinet that Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron have established pursues comparable objectives but against a different background. In 2004, they exhibited their work at the Schaulager in an exhibition that was subsequently on view in Rotterdam at the Netherlands Architecture Institute and at ‘their’ Tate Modern in London. Today, they casually refer to this exhibition as ‘waste’, for it consisted of parts of a working process that do not lay claim to any artistic value in themselves but offer an insight into the complexity of the analysis and research that go into the making of a project. The archive, therefore, is not a collection of the documents that architectural offices are legally required to keep on file, but rather a vast accumulation of models, plans and sketches that document the emergence of a design. In addition, the archives contain works of art, particularly from the field of photography, by artists such as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Jeff Wall, with whom Herzog & de Meuron regularly collaborate. Back to the Beginnings
The photograph on pages 26 –27 shows a view of Asklepios 8, with a low building in the middle ground designed by Herzog & de Meuron in the early 1990s for the former Sandoz company. When they first started out, the architects designed various projects for Sandoz, among them a centre for technological development, which was pragmatically downsized when it was built. Interestingly, the Dutch photographer Erica Overmeer was working in their offices at the time. Basel has long been home to the pharmaceutical industry, a tradition that goes back to the Middle Ages. When St. Alban Monastery was founded at the end of the 11th century, two commercial canals were built each with six mills placed at intervals. Various branches of industry, such as producers of wood and paper, benefited for centuries from hydropower, as did the later manufacturers of silk ribbons in the 19th century. The need for colours and dies for the ribbons led to the rise of the pharmaceutical industry in Basel. Perhaps wise foresight played a role when Herzog & de Meuron moved into their first offices in precisely that neighbourhood, in the St. Alban Quartier.
Illustrations p. 10: Auguste Renoir, ‘Jeune femme à la voilette’, oil on canvas,
p. 13: Mock-up at Novartis Campus (archives Herzog & de Meuron)
61,3 × 50,8 cm, around 1870, Musée d’Orsay, Paris
p. 14: Model black (archives Herzog & de Meuron)
p. 11: Exhibition ‘Architektur Denkform’, Museum of Architecture Basel, O ctober 1 until November 20, 1988 (archives Swiss Architecture Museum)
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