Draw what you can picture in your deepest imagination
But only build what is responsible
When I was 13 years old, my greatest wish was to possess the best set of drawing instruments, a Wild RZ 40. This tool was designed for surveyors, scientists and specialised draughtsmen. Later, I added geometry tools, proportional compasses, hatching machines and distortion-free crystal rulers. Like a child who wants the best concert violin, I wanted to conquer architecture with this masterpiece of Swiss precision mechanics, even though I could hardly draw more than a straight line. Until the early Modern Movement, important architects could be successful painters, sculptors and teachers at the same time, and in the case of Le Corbusier, even writers. Unfortunately, I have only partially succeeded in a creative career between mutually stimulating artistic disciplines. Today's architecture business, characterised by entrepreneurship, politics and utilitarian thinking, issuspicious of artistic thinking, and "pure" artists are suspicious of the functionality of the applied arts and architecture.
Years later, after completing my training at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) and gaining professional experience in various architectural firms, I was able to get to know and practise in one of the worlds best printmaking studios. After a further detour via teaching at architecture schools in the USA, Great Britain and Italy, my professional career took me back to Switzerland, where I ran an architectural practice, first as a partner and then as the sole owner. All three careers, whether as an artist, teacher or architect, seemed worthwhile and promising at the time. But I chose architecture as my main profession in order to face the real professional world, so to speak.
Only today do I realise how much my thinking as an architect, artist and teacher has been determined by the expressive possibilities of drawings. That is why I have given them priority in this compilation, while being fully aware that many perhaps even more important design parameters have not been given due consideration. For me, the preoccupation with the nature of pictorial representations remains a guiding theme. The detachment and liberation of the image structure from the image carrier and the dissolution of the image into a virtual heap of data has also taken place in architecture in recent decades. Perhaps it was precisely this premonition that prompted me, as a trained architect, to look into the archetypes of architectural representation. Cave paintings, Egyptian stone reliefs, inscriptions in stone, frescoes, woodcuts and engravings, but also drawings on all kinds of supports have two things incommon: an image carrier that helps to shape the image structure and is an integral part of the image, and the creative process based on the craftsmanshipand skill of the creator. The new generation has left the sovereignty over ourimages to the irresponsible digital space.
Today we realize that construction activity is partly responsible for the drastic deterioration of living conditions on our planet and the dramatic declineof nature and habitats. This bad news increasingly creeped into my consciousness over the years. The evidence of an approaching "point of no return", as well as the realisation that the previously much-praised belief in progress, or the Gute Form no longer help, have shifted the significance of architectural representation into a new light. Towards the end of my architectural practice my focus has turned away from the spontaneous handwritten signature towards vivid imaginations of sustainableconcepts for building in the future.
This retrospective allows me to look back critically on my work. The lists of work differentiate between "architecture", i.e. projects of my office, and "studies/art", i.e. artistic studies developed from within me and represented by artistic means. These included rawings and sketchbooks on one hand and printmaking in the broadest sense onthe other hand. The printed works can further be divided into three categories: In my early career, I cultivated classical printmaking above all in aquatint or engraving technique on copper plates. Much later, accompanying the architectural practice, I tried to depict fantastic quasi-architectures using contemporary digital techniques, blending utopia, history and reality, as in Piranesi's work. Recently, and encouraged by the Biennale contribution, I used this experience to depict concrete, time-critical architectural concepts, sometimes supplemented by abstract 3d models, deliberately evoking a realistic built environment. The copper plates were printed on the presses of the Atelier de St. Prex. The "digital" works consist of Jpeg files put on paper as high-quality print previews, stored in folders, but would still have to be reprinted as art prints on special paper for archiving and exhibition purposes.
