Ludovic Balland – författare

Duplex Architects were founded in 2007 in Zurich and now also run offices in Düsseldorf, Hamburg, and, most recently, in Paris. They have gained an excellent reputation internationally for their designs of various scales and across a vast range of typologies.This first monograph on Duplex Architects’ work in Germany and Switzerland offers a close look at their approach to housing design. Five projects in Switzerland are documented extensively through a wealth of images, plans, and visualisations, exemplifying the firm’s position on urban planning, typology research, and materiality and demonstrating their utterly independent way of working. Urban scale, search for new forms of communal living, the importance of community, and a collaborative design process are at the core of Duplex Architects’ explorations into residential architecture.Nele Dechmann’s text and Ludovic Balland’s photo essay serve to illuminate Duplex Architects’ work each in their own way. Further texts are contributed by the firm’s founding partners Anne Kaestle and Dan Schürch, as well as by other expert authors, who cast their own personal glance at the five projects featured in this book.

Lux Guyer (1894–1955) was the first female architect to establish her own studio in Switzerland in 1924. One of her key designs is the Obere Schiedhalde, a single-family home above Küsnacht near Zurich. Completed in 1929 and temporarily occupied by Guyer and her family themselves, it is a variation on her legendary SAFFA-Haus of 1928. Between 2012 and 2018, the building itself as well as the surrounding garden were extensively and carefully restored by Basel-based architecture firm Christ & Gantenbein together with Sven Richter, co-founder of Richter Tobler Architects in Basel. Working in close collaboration with the Canton of Zurich’s office for the preservation of historic monuments, they also called in experts for a historically conscious overhaul of the building’s interior design, colour scheme, furniture, and garden design.Together with the current owners, the architects made it their mission to not only preserve this significant architectural monument of Swiss Modernism, but also make it accessible to the public through this book. Conceived by graphic designers Ludovic Balland and Annina Schepping, it offers an in-depth documentation of the renovated Obere Schiedhalde. Some 200 photographs of the house, garden, interior details, and furniture, as well as historic and newly drawn plans are supplemented with texts in German and English that tell the story of the building and the entire undertaking of its restoration.Text in English and German.

This first monograph on the widely acclaimed Basel-based firm Manuel Herz Architects features 19 built and unrealised projects from their portfolio since 2004. Developed for highly diverse locations in ten countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia, they vary greatly in terms of building programme, scale, character, and vision. The projects include housing, cultural and public buildings, exhibition and furniture designs, as well as architectural and urban research.Conceived as a critical retrospective, this book traces all stages of a project from initial sketches to completion, looking also at the afterlife of realised buildings. As the title Unfinished Atlas suggests, architecture should never be considered to be entirely completed: there is always room and potential for later interventions by and with others. Five thematic chapters highlight the ever-changing challenges for a designer that arise from working in complex environments and different socioeconomic conditions.Contributions by distinguished international authors and by the firm’s founder Manuel Herz reflect on the need to negotiate between differing requirements of all actors involved, cultural traditions and forms of expression, as well as the correction of mistakes and adaption to setbacks en route to a realised building.

Swiss graphic designer Lea Michel has chosen for her book the single most often impersonated figure in Western movie history: The President of the United States. Taking 164 fictitious presidents, male and female (for the first time in Curtis Bernhard's comedy Kisses for my President of 1964), it charts the range of actions of the world's formerly most powerful person - making statements or giving speeches, standing in front of or sitting behind the desk at the Oval Office, climbing out of or into limousines, wearing dressing gowns.Six presidential typologies - Father and Husband, Villain, Alien, Clown, Hero, Lover - sorted by 241 sub-categories, such as Shaking Hands, Looking Shocked at a Screen, or In a Video Conference with a Terrorist. Taken from films and TV and online series, such as Dr. Strangelove, Independence Day, or House of Cards,as well as from many lesser known productions, they also highlight the intense relationship between fiction and reality in a time where the incumbent president exploits all media to an unprecedented extent to market himself and to increase his popularity.