Founded in Berlin by Simona Malvezzi (Milan, 1966), Johannes Kuehn (Hamburg, 1969) and Wilfried Kuehn (Hamburg, 1967), Kuehn Malvezzi Associates operates in different fields and on different scales of architectural design.

The office has a special predilection for the creation of art-related spaces – installations, exhibitions and museums – always cooperating directly with artists, curators and institutions. Dialogue is certainly key in the architecture designed by Kuehn Malvezzi, whatever the purpose of the building.

We see a dialogue between viewers and artwork at the Documenta 11 installation (Kassel, Germany, 2002) where visitors could create individual trajectories across the exhibition spaces. We see a dialogue between social, religious and cultural backgrounds in the House of One, an interreligious house of prayer and learning (Berlin, 2017). And we see dialogue between context and history in architectural statements based on the coexistence of new and existing elements (Flick Collection, Berlin, 2004), on the critique of historicist interpretations of the city (the firm’s project for the HumboldtForum competition, Berlin, 2008), and on visually narrative functions (the renovation of Rolf Gutbrod’s Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin, 2014). 

At Kuehn-Malvezzi, the controlled creation of form is a programmegenerating process. Theoretical categorisations such as “spaces for art” or “rational shapes” are definitions of how space can be understood as a generator of a critical approach that establishes connections between the inhabitant and the content, between the inhabitant and the project itself in relation to its purpose and context.