Forms of Practice: German Swiss Architecture 1980-2000

摘要

On my first visit to Basel thirty years ago, when I knew Herzog & de Meuron's early projects because 9H had published the Photographer's Studio (1981-82, pub. 83, no. 5) and the Ricola Warehouse (1987, pub. 89, no. 8), I, like much of the Anglo-Saxon architectural world, knew little or nothing of contemporary Swiss architecture. I remember being introduced by a Basel friend to a recently completed riverside housing development she thought interesting at St Alban-Tal. I did not know the architects Diener & Diener. Its design impressed me as simultaneously appropriate to its previously industrial urban context, and unemphatically modern. While humanely domestic, it was not of an obvious residential typology, in either the English domestic or the German building exhibition genres. It was unusual then to encounter a new project which could be typologically and functionally ambiguous, so self-effacing and yet difficult to pin down. In this dignified contextual development, and in Basel's aura of stable integrity, I had a similar cultural experience to an earlier Zurich visit, of feeling simultaneously comfortable and uneasy.