About landscape, architecture and cities

The publication about our projects edited by Kathrin Aste and Frank Ludin with texts by Roger Connah, Oliver Domeisen, Claudia Pasquero and Florian Waldvogel is available in the book stores now!

The book ist published by Park Books
ISBN 978-3-03860-327-6

There are many notions of which principles should be followed by architectural form. Form follows: function, fiction, fashion, vision, technology, motion, the golden section, the genius loci, the clients’ ideas. All of these are relevant, but none exclusively so.

Our architectural practice of the past fifteen years has taught us that architecture is a subject that follows a complex cognitive process, which not so much defines a conclusive solution as formulates a synthesis that is constantly being reformulated on the basis of new parameters. This process oscillates between perception and design, between information and formation.

The partly intuitive and partly methodical process that shapes an architectural design is known as form-finding and form-giving. Form-finding describes a search that generates knowledge, which informs and thus establishes a form based on objective, functional and generally understood criteria, whereas form-giving denotes how we select and, thus, designate the shape of a building.

This catalogue employs a diverse range of realised buildings to illustrate the interaction between form-finding and form-giving, whose contributions to projects are dynamic and never linear. These range from the interaction with natural elements, via the transformation of urban and social spaces, to the impact of digital processes on architectural form. And even if form-finding is a predominantly analytical process and there is no predefined formal concept, we understand form-giving to be a creative, tectonic practice that establishes a relationship between society and the environment, between the functional and the possible.

Information & Formation reminds us that design, production and building are together acts of argumentation and debate that we perform, not to satisfy the demands of constructional functionalism and capitalistic investment logic, but in order to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow in a positively critical and aesthetically responsible way.