Jacques Herzog (1950-) and Pierre de Meuron (1950-) were born in Basel, Switzerland. They attended university together at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich (ETH, or Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich and were awarded their architecture degrees in 1975. Both served as assistants to Professor Wolf Schnebli at ETH in 1977. They formed their partnership, Herzog and de Meuron, in Basel in 1978. The firm has two additional partners, Harry Gugger (1956-) and Christine B (1964), both of whom received their architecture degrees from ETH in 1990. Friends since kindergarten, Herzog and de Meuron developed a very natural collaboration in their early careers that they extended in the creation of their firm.
The firm first gained notice through a series of exhibitions that they mounted and treated as architectural projects at STAMPA Galerie in Basel in 1979, 1981, 1983, and 1988. By 1995, their work was the subject of larger exhibitions at both the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A strong connection with the art world has been constant throughout the history of the firm, a natural phenomenon given their location in an art center such as Basel. Herzog has said, “We prefer art to architecture, and for that matter, artists to architects.” They have been influenced by the formalism and minimalism of artists such as Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, James Turrell, and Richard Serra and share with those innovators an interest in perception and in the relationship between object and the social, geographic, and physical context. Herzog and de Meuron collaborated early on with artist Helmut Federle on color studies for a facade design and have had several fruitful collaborations with the French artist Remy Zaugg, whom Herzog has referred to as a fifth partner. The studio that they designed in 1996 for and with Rémy Zaugg in Mulhouse-Pfastarr, France, is one of several buildings that the firm has created for the production and display of art.
The project that attracted the greatest early international interest in Herzog and de Meuron was the Goetz Gallery (1992) in Munich, designed to house a private contemporary art collection on the grounds of the owners’ home. Building restrictions limiting the height and footprint of the structure in a residential neighborhood required construction of a basement level to provide the stipulated amount of exhibition space. This restriction provoked an ingenious section for the building wherein both the basement and upper-level galleries have equivalent spatial qualities and lighting from a high horizontal band of matte-glazed windows. The exterior of the simple rectangular pavilion appears to be a wooden volume hovering between two milky glass strips. The project is inextricably tied to art, from its cleanly detailed galleries where controlled, glare-free light falls from technically sophisticated clerestories to its elegantly skinned volume that rests like a huge piece of minimalist sculpture in the garden. The largest art-related work of Herzog and de Meuron is the Tate Gallery of Modern Art (2000) at Bankside in London. The project renovates and extends a historic power station on the Thames River directly across from St. Paul's Cathedral. This ambitious architecture and urban design undertaking creates not just a building but a whole urban district for viewing art. Grand public spaces dedicated to the display of sculpture are linked to existing walkways along the river. The neighborhood to the south is enlivened by a new public square with shops and kiosks, joining the museum to its environs. The Tate Bankside, according to Herzog and de Meuron, is about looking, perception, and communication. Its six suites of galleries, along with the renovated Turbine Hall, offer a wide variety of spaces and contexts in which to experience modern and contemporary art and interact with other visitors.
Herzog and de Meuron have dealt with a wide range of building types, including offices, housing, university buildings, and industrial projects. The firm approached each of these with the same refined sensibilities that they have brought to their art-related work. In a series of railway projects in the Aufdem Wolf industrial area of Basel, Herzog and de Meuron have demonstrated their ability to transform ordinary building programs and nondescript sites into significant works of architecture. The large Railway Engine Depot (1999) gives clarity and order to a wasteland of railway tracks, warehouses, sheds, and weeds. Nearby, Signal Box 4 (1995) is a six-story district landmark that, in its treatment as a single monolithic block, becomes a sculptural object. The Central Signal Box (2000) creates a visual dialogue with its earlier counterpart but also functions as a part of the rest of the city in its close relationship to the street and existing solitary buildings around it. Both signal boxes are clad in eight-inch-wide copper strips that are twisted in the midsection of some walls to admit daylight. The copper cladding not only provides durability in a corrosive industrial environment but also becomes a Faraday cage, protecting electronic equipment inside from electromagnetic fields on the site.
The Dominus Winery (1998) in Napa Valley, California, similarly elevates a building of modest purposes to high art. Its long, thin volume parallels the rows of vines that surround it as well as a ridge of hills in the distance, creating an impressive symbiosis of structure and site. The building's skin is constructed of gabions (wire cages filled with rocks) employing local basalt that further links the agricultural structure to the land. Elegantly and poetically detailed, the winery combines, like winemaking itself, technical proficiency and sensory delight.
This combination characterizes much of Herzog and de Meuron’s work in which experiments with wood, copper, stone, concrete, and glass have produced dazzling and innovative visual effects. Patterns created by varied concrete textures or by silk-screen printing on glass, for example, have gone through several generations of refinement, from the Pafalzenhole Sports Center (1993) in France to the Technical School Library (1999) in Eberswalde, Germany.
Lawrence W. Speck
Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.2 (G-O). Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005. |
