Over the last decade, architecture critics have been saying and writing a lot on the ornament, and about its rediscovery, re-appropriation and reinvention by designers of different cultural backgrounds and origins. Plentiful examples of this rehabilitation originate in Switzerland. There, already back in 2006 Jacques Herzog could claim that in the frame of his and de Meuron’s poetic “the ornament is not something added on, but becomes one with the production of form”.
The residential building completed in 2018 by idA Architekten in Zurich, within a triangular parcel between Gossauerstrasse and Heuweidlistrasse, certainly stems from a genealogy of architectures avoiding minimalism and constructing their aesthetics also on additions (the pitched roof), exceptions (the portholes lighting up the stairwell) and details (the jagged profile of many window frames).
The dramatic pictures commissioned by the Swiss firm to Valentin Jeck, taken under the most typically Helvetian dull grey sky, strongly resonate with the fine Duripanel (wood and concrete) cladding boards, and their slight golden shades. This “public image” of the building is somewhat indulgent, as some of the elements mentioned above. It is ultimately a quite self-referential representational strategy for an architecture which, in other respects, stands out for its remarkable spatial clarity and for the above average material quality of both its collective and private spaces.
- Project:
- residential building
- Location:
- Zurich, Switzerland
- Architect:
- idA Architekten
- Completion:
- 2018