070 HERZOG & DE MEURON


Paris, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Berlin and Munich.


Working from their Basel studio overlooking the Rhine, the firm’s founders have always leaned towards the creative side of architecture, experimenting with different materials and structures to create buildings saturated with atmosphere and personality. Distinctive cladding with a marked materiality is a signature of their designs, which are famed for turning the mundane into the adventurous. ‘We look for materials which are as breathtakingly beautiful as the cherry blossom in Japan, as dense and compact as the rock formations of the Alps, or as mysterious and unfathomable as the surface of the oceans,’ the architects explain. For example, their monolithic Ricola Kräuterzentrum, a herb processing plant near Basel, is built largely from locally-sourced


‘It is exciting for us to deal with existing structures because the attendant constraints demand a very different kind of creative energy’


earth, used for both the building’s interior and exterior walls; in Hamburg, on top of a red- brick warehouse, the crystalline facade of the Elbphilharmonie concert hall employs an ingenious array of shaped glass elements to reflect the shifting moods of the city’s weather, while the simple, box-like form of the Dominus Winery in Napa Valley, California, is wrapped with basalt-filled gabions described by the architects as ‘a kind of stone wickerwork with varying degrees of transparency, more like skin than like traditional masonry.’


London is the city that shot Herzog & de Meuron to international fame, following their conversion of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s disused Bankside Power Station into Tate Modern. Te iconic cathedral to art opened in 2000 and today is one of the UK’s most popular visitor attractions. Te project was a unique collaboration with the pre-existing architecture. Rather than demolishing Scott’s 1952 building, the Swiss architects’ design


Left The striking crystalline facade of Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie concert hall


Right M+ is a monumental museum in West Kowloon, with a tall vertical tower that doubles up as a 12-storey LCD screen for the projection of artworks


worked with and celebrated the building’s industrial vernacular. ‘You cannot always start from scratch’, they noted. ‘It is exciting for us to deal with existing structures because the attendant constraints demand a very different kind of creative energy.’ Bridges, balconies and a new system of floors and walls were added to the post-industrial structure, while the six-storey high Turbine Hall, once home to huge electricity generators, established the link between outside and inside. Tis vast space provided a setting for memorable installations such as Olafur


Eliasson’s immersive Te Weather Project (2003), in which a giant artificial sun, composed of mono-frequency lamps, bathed viewers in a hazy yellow light.


Te gallery spaces, which have hosted some of the world’s most famous artists, feature a range of ceiling heights, floor surfaces and light sources, including some with huge floor to ceiling windows overlooking the Tames and St Paul’s cathedral. Te architects were invited back a few years later to design the museum’s Switch House extension, which opened in 2016.


IWAN BAAN


KEVIN MAK


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