arquitectura zona cero: SWITZERLAND FROM JAPAN [part 2]

EM2N, Registration offices in Basilea

EM2N / localarchitecture / :mlzd

The a+u Japanese magazine approaches again the Helvetian country with two suggestive titles: Swiss Sensibilites (447) published in 2010, and Swiss Sounds (484) in 2011. The first involves an update of the previous Swiss Passion, by incorporating the latest production of some teams with a solid experience which is also completed with some emerging figures of the Swiss mosaic; of these I highlight the following three offices: EM2N, localarchitecture: and :mlzd.

The latest issue dedicated to this country by the Japanese publisher, Swiss Sounds, is presented with the aim of summing up the most significant Swiss architectural scene over a decade, that which runs from 2000 to 2009. For this summarizing work, it relies on a previous article in which the most recent precedents of this first decade are analyzed, linking this one with the previous one: the Architecture created since 1990. This number follows with a long selection in which the main 100 works of the studied decade are referenced (and are placed) –like a top-hundred mode- and it continues with the exhibition of the most interesting works from different architects. This issue finishes with a new delivery of emerging architects, who coincide with the three referenced in the previous number, and the scene output of a new team that undoubtedly will take positions in the Swiss panorama given the quality of his work: the Gramazio&Kohler studio. After reviewing the current architecture panorama of the Confederation -from the windows that provide us a+u pages- we stop to take a look at what are presented, with great success, as new and whose interest we can immediately check.

If to date the Swiss architecture has dragged the stigma to present some introspection, understood this as the taste for buildings arranged like objects in the landscape, buildings closed in on themselves and, therefore, with little contextual relationship; the architecture that EM2N offers, it changes radically with this tendency (which, on the other hand, it is unfair as a general label). Buildings that presents this Zurich´s office, led by Mathias Müller and Daniel Niggli, show a greater dialogue with its surroundings -mainly the urban one- taking part of the city flows and with the processes of hybridization of the uses to which the contemporary city is subjected assuming, somehow, the postulates of Venturi in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966). From the early Vacation House in Flumserberg (2003), to the more recent and surprising intervention to recover for the city a urban space trapped under the spans of a viaduct in Zurich, by creating a shopping zone, with an extraordinary execution, the trajectory of this team is characterized for buildings with high spatial presence and how it could not be otherwise, a technical virtuosity that defines –this yes- by itself, the way of making of Swiss.

EM2M, 11 Theatre refurbishment , Zurich

EM2N, City Garden Hotel in Zug

EM2N, Intervention on a viaduct, Zurich

The localarchitecture multidisciplinary studio, based in Lausanne, was founded in 2002, his presentation card is a small-scale work, of ephemeral architecture, that, however, has strolled his image of origami by most architectural publications for recent years. This is a origami to house temporarily the chapel of Diaconnesses in Pompales (with Danilo Mondada). The formal solution and technique resolution, inseparable in this case, are at the service of wrapping that intimate moment that involves the praying of nuns. The Special Education School that was raised by the team in Lausanne (2006-2009) is an example of a formal concision and geometric rigor, dynamized, in a very subtle way, by the rhythm of the external carpentries. In one of his last works built: the new urban area of Market Square in Rennes (2010), the excellent trace designed for the redevelopment of this urban space, is ruled for the filigree of some concrete decks which, despite the apparent weight of the material used in its execution: the concrete, seem to float on the pavement of the square, with his petrous plates barely sustained by slender metal tubes, and inviting the walker to come under the stone canopy.

localarchitecture, St. Loup Temporary Chapel , Pompales

The Special Education School that was raised by the team in Lausanne (2006-2009) is an example of a formal concision and geometric rigor, dynamized, in a very subtle way, by the rhythm of the external carpentries.

localarchitecture, Special Education School in Lausanne

localarchitecture, Market Square in Renens

In one of his last works built: the new urban area of Market Square in Rennes (2010), the excellent trace designed for the redevelopment of this urban space, is ruled for the filigree of some concrete decks which, despite the apparent weight of the material used in its execution: the concrete, seem to float on the pavement of the square, with his petrous plates barely sustained by slender metal tubes, and inviting the walker to come under the stone canopy.

:mzld, Professional School in Biel

The Biel team, which was founded in 1997, :mlzd has a brief but very interesting career. Theirs are works such as the History Museum in Bern (2001-2009), the Professional School in Biel, the extension of Rapperswil-Juna Museum (2007-2011), and the splendid intervention in the Cantonal School in Wettingen (2002-2008), with an added volume, located in a headwall, which houses the new coffee shop of the centre. This latter work is resolved as a simple pavilion with a gable roof, that reproduces the profile of the original building, and its interest lies in the solution found for the cladding: an overlapped skin that was resolved with a dark aluminum punched sheet that coats, holistically, the entire volume of the small pavilion, filtering the light and protecting its indoor from the views of the street with the interposition of this amazing mechanized lattice.