Valerio Olgiati – författare

This book presents for the first time the Wyoming Project, a commission conceived and designed by Swiss architect Valerio Olgiati in collaboration with Kanye West in the Wyoming desert.

Valerio Olgiati’s latest book is about the beauty of the very varied buildings designed by the Swiss architect, captured in colour photographs and plans. The 15 projects, around half of them realised since the publication of Olgiati’s most recent monograph in 2018, are featured in this exquisite small volume for the first time as finished buildings.Indoor and outdoor shots show Olgiati’s intuition for spectacular buildings and atmospheric interiors — from the museum for the UNESCO world cultural heritage site in Bahrain to the Céline flagship store in Miami, from the office building for Baloise Insurance’s headquarters in Basel to the bedroom of the French fashion designer Nicolas Ghesquière, from the visitor centre of the Swiss National Park to the atelier for the musician Linard Bardill in Scharans.They are presented through colour photographs, floor plans, and sections. The elegant book design follows the style of Olgiati’s highly successful previous book, The Images of Architects.

The Graubünden-based architect Valerio Olgiati has become well-known outside Switzerland for such buildings as his school building in Paspels and the Atelier Bardill in Scharans, but not least for his Yellow House and his studio in Flims. In the form of a wellillustrated essay, the architect explains how he develops his projects, the parameters that influence his design process, and the intellectual context from which he works. In a reduced, clear language this iconographic autobiography offers a very personal view of the Valerio Olgiati’s activity and of his selfimage as an architect, thus supplementing with a personal statement the earlier publication DADO.Text and images complement each other to create a narrative thread that offers informative insights into the architect’s intellectual and visual imagination and expands our understanding of Olgiati’s oeuvre.

Mit der Schule in Paspel, dem „Gelben Haus" in Flims und dem Atelier Bardill wurde Valerio Olgiati zum Star der jüngeren Architektengeneration in der Schweiz, die Bauten sind auch international vielfach ausgezeichnetenDie Publikation beschreibt anschaulich wie der Architekt Olgiati seine Projekte entwickelt, welche Parameter seinen Entwurfsprozess beeinflussen und aus welchen intellektuellen Kontext er wirkt. Sie bietet damit einen sehr persönlichen Einblick in das Wirken des Graubündner Architekten, ebenso wie in sein architektonisches Selbstverständnis.Das Buch liefert in reduzierter und klares Sprache einen sehr persönlichen Zugang zur Positionen und Prägungen von Valerio Olgiati und als Vorlesung konzipiert. Text und Bild ergänzen sich zu einem Erzählstrang, an dessen Ende der Leser ein erweitertes Verständnis zu Olgiatis Werk und der Persönlichkeit des Architekten haben wird. Die darin enthaltene ikonografische Autobiografie Olgiatis gibt aufschlussreich Einblick in die intellektuelle und visuelle Vorstellungskraft des Architekten.

The reasons for this houseFor many years, my wife Tamara and I had been searching for a place for which we could leave our current home in the Swiss mountains on social, cultural and climatic grounds. In the Alentejo region in Portugal, we found the perfect situation. A wonderful climate, a wide empty landscape and an existing culture that we like. Here, we spend a couple of months a year. From here, we work – my wife is also an architect – close to our office in Flims. The basic idea and the all-influencing aim of our project was to create a garden, even more than a shelter, which, of course, we also have. The form of our house indeed should not primarily express ‘shelter’. It is the ‘garden’ that has to essentially find its form and that we want to experience. To date, three main forms are known to me in terms of housing. The first, ‘urban living’, I understand as living in the dense fabric of an urban setting. Then, ‘suburban living’, which takes place in a typical one-family home with a small garden in suburbia, and finally, ‘country living’, where people live socially and infrastructurally connected at large rural intervals. We excluded all three of these forms for our house. This was not what we were looking for. Our home is far away from the next town. It is disconnected in every respect. There is only the vast empty landscape around us. In Villa Além, a sense of loneliness and independence arises. It is a real retreat. I was looking for a term for this type of housing and have arrived at ‘landscape living’. – Valerio Olgiati