2G N.37
Valerio Olgiati
 Pascal Flammer, Patrick Gartmann, Jacques Lucan, Valerio Olgiati, Moisés Puente, Raphael Zuber, David Zumstein (texts)

For years now, Swiss architecture has been grabbing international attention not only for the high general level of its buildings but for a few great names. Aside from the megastudio of Herzog and de Meuron, which builds on all five continents, Switzerland has an extensive network of small studios with a modest work that, as in the case of Peter Zumthor and Peter Märkli, have crossed the frontier and become known the world over for the care, beauty and precision of their buildings. Valerio Olgiati's work would belong to this genealogy of the patient, well-made body of work.

Valerio Olgiati became known through the school in Paspels and, a little later, through the radical reconstruction of Das Gelbe Haus -two small buildings in villages in the Swiss canton of Grisons that appeared in all the main international magazines (a+u, Baumeister, AA Files, etc.). The radical nature of his approach and the perfect execution of clear and concise ideas have enabled his work to exude a special intensity and to stand out within the new crop of Swiss architecture.
30 x 23 cm
144 pp páginas ilustradas en color
texto: english/español
Publicación trimestral
ISSN: 1136-9647

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Table of contents:

Introductions
Textured Spatiality and Frozen Chaos by Jacques Lucan
Depicting an Architecture by Raphael Zuber
In Favour of a Reductive Architecture by Moisés Puente
Ambivalent Systems: On the Formation of Valerio Olgiati's Design by Pascal Flammer with David Zumstein

Works and Projects
Kucher House, Rottenburg am Neckar
Plan for the Cuncas area, Sils im Engadin
Redevelopment of the Souk of Beirut
School, Paspels
The Lake Cauma Project, Flims
Three condominiums, Chur
Das gelbe Haus, Flims
House in Sari d’Orcino, Corsica
Office building, Zurich
K + N House, Wollerau
Swiss National Park Visitors Centre, Zernez
Structural report: University of Lucerne by Patrick Gartmann
University of Lucerne
Gornergrat Visitors Center, Zermatt
Learning Centre, EPFL, Lausanne
National Palace Museum, Taipei
Ardia Palace, Tirana

Biography

nexus
Iconographic Autobiography by Valerio Olgiati

Text from the first introduction:

‘Textured Spatiality and Frozen Chaos

Jacques Lucan

The first important building by Valerio Olgiati brought him immediate fame. For this to happen it had to be radical, since in Switzerland we were accustomed in the 1990s to ‘formes fortes’ (strong shapes), as Martin Steinmann called them. There is no doubt that Paspels School has a ‘forme forte’. The first impression is of a reinforced concrete monolith that is geometrically simple, a parallelepiped with a square base and a sloping roof. It is a forbidding object, since it is brutally carved out without affectation. If we saw only this we could conclude that the architect wanted to shake us up, to shock us with a powerful gesture which tries to challenge the surrounding mountains in this magnificent location. We would understand quickly and then go on our way.

Perceptual experience

However, the building’s forbidding appearance stops, holds back and detains us in a way. Why did the architect choose this strength of expression bordering on violence? Why, instead of a simple form, many irregularities? So why are the windows, the volume’s only ‘events’, staggered as if driven in a rotating movement? Why are some window frames set back while others are flush with the surface? Why are some horizontal, and others smaller and almost square? I ask this set of questions because, while the building does not immediately reveal the rule governing the arrangement of visible elements, nevertheless it suggests that a rule exists -from one facade to another rhythms take shape, a movement starts, contrasts are repeated, patterns appear. What is the rule?

Let us return to the building’s monolithic character. It belongs to the category Robert Morris called ‘unitary forms,’ polyhedrons that ‘seem to fail to present lines of fracture by which they could divide for easy part-to-part relationships to be established.’ From this perspective Paspels School should be understood as a whole, an entity so indivisible that no joint shows a possible separation, nor does any axis of symmetry divide the volume. Openings are not set out at all regularly; in particular, as if they are located for a reason which is at present hidden, they do not fit into the grid of the reinforced-concrete formwork. This has the effect of giving the school an even more monolithic character, with the pattern of formwork unaffected by the openings. The intervals between openings always vary slightly, so they seem to disturb the regularity of the complex.

Moreover, by looking slowly and carefully we see that the four corners of the building seem not to be right angles, but are slightly acute or obtuse. These deformations mean that the volume is not a ‘cube’. Although the differences, intervals and deformations are visible, they are slight and not very distinct. Because of this we are not trained in these problems of stability and balance, issues to which we have accustomed modern architecture in its picturesque tension.

In the end Paspels School offers a perceptual experience. It invites us to circle round as if around a totem pole, looking at each facade, but there is no ideal position where we can stop, no viewpoint from which we can understand the building in its entirety. So it is a paradox, one which Valerio Olgiati likes to present elsewhere: to create a monolithic and static building with irregularities that just emphasise its unified and harmonious character and which, being visible and understandable, make us move, change position, circle round, and increase the number of viewpoints, none of which is more important than the others. This experience is really phenomenological, in the sense used by Maurice Merleau-Ponty himself: ‘The perceived thing is not an ideal unity possessed by intelligence, like a geometric concept for example; rather it is an entity open to the perspective of an undefined number of views which tally according to a certain style, style that defined the object concerned.’ From now on we can understand why Paspels School resonates with certain installations by minimalist artists.

Textured spatiality

We will delve further into the style of the building. To do this we must enter the monolith, we have to understand the space, because that will certainly give us the reasons for the distortions and irregularities we have already noted.

The two storeys of classrooms represent an opposition between a communal space, in the shape of a crooked cross with one arm containing the staircase considerably larger than the other three, and three classrooms that are roughly rectangular and equal in size. From one storey to the other there is a rotation of ninety degrees in the general position of the classrooms. The communal spaces in the cross have exposed concrete finishes; classrooms-walls, floors, ceilings-are lined with wood. Each classroom has a long window stretched along one of its sides; all narrow arms of the communal spaces have small windows, while the larger arms of the cross have a long window. Moreover, classroom windows are set back in relation to the school’s exterior surface, whereas windows of communal areas are flush with that surface.

This description is like setting out some of the rules the different components of the school submit to, regulations that produce very strong contrasts of atmosphere, particularly between the communal spaces in grey concrete and the panelled classrooms. But these rules are not enough to account for the spatiality of the building. We must return to the deformation of the ‘cube’ to understand this. None of the arms of the cross are identical, either in length or in width, and their sides are not parallel; this is actually because of the initial deformation whereby only one of the sides of each cross is perpendicular to an external wall.

The complexity of the geometry is the result of a limited number of decisions, but these choices set off a series of intersecting consequences, producing a building which is extremely dense. Just as the visible irregularity of the exterior greatly emphasises the monolith’s coherence, so the visible irregularity of the interior unifies, we can even say solidifies, each communal space in the form of a cross.

Repetition of devices and their successive shifts, gaps that might seem imperceptible but produce a variety of chain reactions, these give the school a property that I call textured spatiality. This spatiality provides the chance to take up many viewpoints, all different, impossible to locate within a system of orthogonal axes, providing a variety of perspective views which, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty said, ‘tally according to a certain style.’ After this, we can understand the architecture of Paspels School, its style. The rules that regulate the arrangement, the interweaving, of the building’s components can only be found in the building itself. The artist Rémy Zaugg said something about the method for a work of art that we can apply to this school: ‘No extrinsic law can regulate this system of signs that contains its own law. The work is its law.’ Rémy Zaugg added ‘when I say I experience a work, I mean understand a system of signs through the meaning and the spirit.’ Through the meaning-he is talking about perception; through the spirit-he means understanding. Perceiving and understanding, this is the experience to which Paspels School invites us.

Unity and organicity

A discussion of Valerio Olgiati’s work must start at Paspels School. Remarks about it can apply to the architect’s other projects and creations, which include certain devices that are even more intense.

The work always unfolds from simple structures with unified forms, although not always deformed as at Paspels, but subjected to a few operations which have a multiplying effect in a chain reaction. Das Gelbe Haus in Flims, the project on the shores of Lake Cauma, the house in Corsica and the K + N House near Lake Zurich, for example, follow this pattern.

Das gelbe Haus is the complete metamorphosis of an old building. The first operation was to take the form of a house with traditional characteristics and make it abstract, suppressing all wall ornamentation, distributing equal openings almost regularly and, above all, combining all walls and the roof of stone slabs with a homogenous whitewash. This paradoxical and provocative whitening covers the house completely and reinforces the abstraction of its ‘cubic’ form, but it simultaneously reveals the numerous changes in the texture of the walls. So abstraction provides two possible points of view that are extremes: the distant view of a unified form; or from a close, tactile distance an impression of a surface, as if we are ‘in the picture’.

The project on the shores of Lake Cauma is also a unified form. In it, two deliberately distinct spaces confront each other, only linked by the umbilical cord of a staircase -the horizontal and panoramic upper-level restaurant, and the narrow, vertical crypt-like bar with a window looking into the bottom of the lake when the summer water level is high. Because the water level varies considerably, these changes modify our perception of the building which, depending on the season, ‘is not the same’. The house in Corsica contrasts two rectangular courtyards of equal size. One is open, the other closed; one is planted with trees, and the living spaces on the lower floor are oriented towards these, while the other is lined with a swimming pool and the bedrooms on the upper floor open onto it. To connect the two levels, two staircases fit together, one linking exterior spaces and the other linking the interior. The absence of a visual relationship between the two staircases produces a labyrinthine structure, another way of describing textured spatiality.

The K + N House is another ‘cube’ that is extraordinarily dense. It sets up contrasts in that, when entering through an upper level passage with no external view, we do not suspect that the living-room on the lower level is open on four sides and opens out to a magnificent panorama of Lake Zurich. Made from a reinforced-concrete shell, the house is not a collection of walls, floors, columns or partitions constructed separately. As was already true of the Paspels School, we can say that the construction is heavy and continuous. The walls and floors show no joints or interruptions; they are built with the same light-coloured concrete, left exposed everywhere. Similarly, the internal walls are not partitions; they are all reinforced concrete walls, always the same colour, the same thickness -bathroom and dressing-room walls, as well as kitchen and bedroom walls. This is a way of saying that every space is potentially a room, however small it is, and is an inseparable part of the house organism, an indivisible part of the whole. This is also to say that the whole is indivisible, or that it cannot be divided in another way -the whole is not an assembly of parts, it is a unit.

Following the example of Paspels School, the house in Corsica or the project on the shores of Lake Cauma, the K + N House does not have a framework separate from the envelope; the whole thing is a framework. To express its monolithic unity it simply resorts to a material that provides its monochrome colouring. To emphasise its unity there is no overall axis of symmetry-the four windows of the bedroom and office floor, all vertical, are out of line with the four large horizontal openings of the living room on the lower floor. Elements of the second work are also always concerned with unity-just one species of wood is selected for all joinery; each interior door is simply a timber rectangle, without rails and stiles or subdivision into panels; each of the four living-room windows is not subdivided and has just one pane, and so on.

In the final analysis, to put it in the way Rémy Zaugg did, each of the buildings described above contains its own law. But they all provide strong contrasts and are able to avoid all fragmentation. Contrasts between the rooms that comprise a building reinforce its unity, because in textured spatiality each room is inseparable from the others -a building is a true indivisible organism.

Frozen chaos

The fact that the structures are initially simple and are submitted to operations which are few, but have many effects that multiply in chain reactions, seems to trigger an irreversible process. The first decision leads to one result; a second decision leads to a second result; interference between the results produces a situation that cannot be ascribed purely to one or other of the initial decisions. Here determinism has become complex -the characteristics of the form or spatiality cannot be related to easily identifiable causes.

Can we describe the irreversible process as an automatic process?

There is no doubt that Valerio Olgiati has sometimes been tempted or seduced by such a way of envisaging the development of a project.

When he designed a building with three flats in Chur, he deduced the final form by automatically applying the urban regulations in force where the project was located. He started by conceiving a square plan comprising rooms wrapped around a stairwell, with enclosed bedrooms but a mainly open living room. Then he deformed this square using computers to introduce regulatory and contextual parameters. With this deformation the building acquired features which meant that it could not be built on another site without losing its significance. By containing its own law and being intimately attached to the place it is built, the building becomes absolutely remarkable.

In the case of the building in Chur, however, although computers open up new possibilities, they do not provide the initial rules for forming the building. The question of uniqueness for formal reasons must be approached by examining Valerio Olgiati’s most recent projects.

When he designed the Zurich office building, Valerio Olgiati’s conceptual attitude was close to the one he used for the building in Chur. Again he wanted to get the greatest profit from the constructional possibilities of a plot that is constrained by regulations. The final form of the building in Chur is the result of the planar deformation of a square, but this is not the case in Zurich where the building’s irregular configuration is mainly due to setting back the upper floors one after the other -a result of regulations governing the profiles of buildings. Therefore the deformation is in three dimensions. The form owes nothing to the architect’s imagination. The shape is not the result of a choice; the only option was to submit to the constraints of the site in a strict way. Ideally the form would be the ‘automatic’ result of the equation which combines regulatory parameters. But Valerio Olgiati goes further in the results he produces. Instead of a system of columns regularly set out on a grid and carrying the load of the various floors, he prefers peripheral columns which are inclined from ground level up to the roof, at an angle that follows the set-back of the floors. This choice means that the floors are free from other load-bearing elements, and the central service and circulation cores are reduced to a minimum. The columns are not all at the same angle, because of the irregular configuration of the ground plan and layouts of the upper floors. The inclination of the columns prevents any ideas that one day, if possible, the building could be extended. The columns almost withdraw the building visually onto itself, thus affirming its unity and intrinsic uniqueness, its organicity.

We can see that the ‘broken’ column on the top floor of Das Gelbe Haus was a sign of preoccupations which the Zurich project raises to an even greater intensity. In Flims the position of the timber column is intriguing and completely unusual. To free the room’s space, the column is shifted in relation to the top of the roof pyramid, but it comes up to this apex because of its vertical break. The tension created unifies the room, and the column must belong to it, it cannot be seen separately. In a way the column gathers the room around itself.

After the Zurich office building, the project for the University of Lucerne represents an intermediate stage. In Zurich stepping back the upper floors defined the form of the complex, but this was not the result of an ‘organic’ deformation but the response to an outside context. This is not so in Lucerne. The ground plan is a deliberately irregular quadrilateral, but this quadrilateral also changes since it twists as floors are added. Therefore Lucerne is like the product of an operation which integrates the preoccupations of the building with three flats in Chur with the characteristics of the Zurich office building.

After Lucerne, projects rapidly follow which, although very different from each other, explore closely related problems: projects for the EPFL Learning Centre, the National Palace Museum in Taiwan and the Ardia Palace in Tirana.

The projects for the EPFL Learning Centre and the National Palace Museum in Taiwan start by deforming a square grid, one which sets out the load-bearing points regularly. At the end of a deformation process on each level by successive iterations, the elements are distributed in a way that seems disordered, chaotic. Each storey has a particular shape, and the columns do not conform at all to a system of orthogonal co-ordinates; each time, the only reminder of regularity is a cross that is part of the bracing. On each floor elements are bound to be in different positions in relation to the other elements, as if they were unable to rest, as if the three-dimensional structure had become dynamic. Calculation of the structure must be done using modelling, a technique which is now possible with computers.

Associating the chaotic distribution of elements throughout the plan with the vertical continuity of a huge structure is the hallmark of the style of Valerio Olgiati’s latest projects, accentuating their unity and uniqueness even more.

Lastly, three comments.

First remark: clearly, the plans of the projects in Lucerne, Lausanne and Taiwan can be adapted to many uses. In this view, it seems that Valerio Olgiati is averse to designing architectural elements other than those related to the framework. I stated that the K + N House is entirely framework, but a wall framework, a shell. The projects in Lucerne, Lausanne, Taiwan and Tirana are also entirely frameworks, but localised frameworks made of enormous columns. For most of his recent projects Valerio Olgiati produced models that only represent the framework, with ramps, stairs and lift shafts, but with no compartments nor envelope. These models are white and sometimes at unusually large scales, as in the case of the EPFL Learning Centre. Thus a model is a credible substitute for the physical presence of a building. Doesn’t the model, in its nakedness, illustrate Auguste Perret’s famous aphorism (which Louis I. Kahn also appropriated): ‘Architecture is what makes beautiful ruins’? He meant that firstly architecture concerns what is durable -framework, columns or walls. Second remark: in the plans for the projects in Lucerne, Lausanne, and Taiwan the layout of elements no longer permits us to trace their regularity or symmetry. Or rather, as in any chaotic context, symmetries can be found everywhere, with the same amount of material being found on one side or the other of the dividing line. From another point of view, making the structure asymmetrical (another way of describing its distortion) triggers real dynamism, a process that is irreversible and perhaps endless, but which should be frozen at one point and called architecture. Third remark: the plans for the projects in Lucerne, Lausanne, Taiwan and Tirana do not set out any hierarchy, as is the case in projects with textured spatiality. Lucerne, Lausanne, Taiwan and Tirana create a paradoxical space. Because of the size of the structural elements, which is enormous, the architecture is extremely stable and unfailingly solid. But on the other hand, given the distortions of these same structural elements, can we describe the connection between them as balanced? The link between things seems unpredictable, appears to be the result of an equation with parameters outside simple deterministic thinking, like a chaotic disorder, frozen chaos.

Valerio Olgiati likes paradoxes, as between freedom and restriction, order and disorder, solidity and fragility, and so on. These paradoxes undoubtedly make his architecture disturbing, difficult to comprehend, impossible to classify. By way of conclusion, I will borrow from Marcel Proust what he said about novelty: ‘Since all novelty depends upon the elimination, first, of the stereotyped attitude to which we have grown accustomed, and which has seemed to us to be reality itself […], it must always appear laboured and tedious. It is founded upon figures of speech with which we are not familiar.’ I will also borrow what he said about the writer, and ask the reader to apply this to the architect: ‘From time to time a new and original writer arrives […]. This new writer is usually fatiguing to read and difficult to understand because he joins things by new relationships.’

Copyright of the text: Jacques Lucan
Copyright of the edition: Editorial Gustavo Gili SL