interview with architect JACQUES HERZOG

Herzog & de Meuron is a Swiss architecture firm, founded and headquartered in Basel, Switzerland in 1978. The careers of founders and senior partners Jacques Herzog (1950) and Pierre de Meuron (1950), closely parallel one another, with both attending the ETH in Zurich. In 2006, The New York Times Magazine called them "one of the most admired architecture firms in the world". Herzog & de Meuron's early works were reductivist pieces of modernity that registered on the same level as the minimalist art of Donald Judd. However, their recent work at Prada Tokyo, the Barcelona Forum Building and the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Olympic Games,
suggest a changing attitude. Though their commitment to the primacy of
materiality shows through all their projects, the manipulation of form
has gone from boxy modernism to volumetric prisms of equal if not
greater presence. The architects often cite Joseph Beuys
as an enduring artistic inspiration and collaborate with different
artists on many architectural projects. Their success can be attributed
to their skills in revealing unfamiliar or unknown relationships
through familiar materials.