Beyond Babel: the work of Swiss architect Peter Märkli

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27 July 2007


After two decades spent designing houses, Peter Märkli is at last building at a substantial scale. Ellis Woodman reports on why the Swiss architect is currently one of the most vital voices in Europe.



In the middle of a quiet residential courtyard in central Zurich stands a diminutive concrete office block. Mounted on the walls of its first floor are a series of freehand sketches, a large format, black-and-white photograph of a Romanesque church and an imposing bronze relief by sculptor Hans Josephsohn. A bed, piles of well thumbed art books and a desk supporting a capacious ashtray complete the scene. If there is a computer, it is well hidden.
It is a captivatingly bohemian environment but hardly one that suggests its occupant, the architect Peter Märkli, heads one of the most sophisticated practices now operating in Europe. This, however, is merely the atelier that Märkli maintains for his own use. On the far side of the city his five staff occupy a space of their own. “It is an arrangement,” he explains as he shows me in, “that means I am a little bit freer and so are they.”
This unconventional office structure is indicative of the singular path that Märkli has followed over the course of his career. As a student at Zurich’s ETH, he found himself in an academic environment overwhelmingly preoccupied with sociological concerns.
“I started my studies just four years after 1968 and the students were very political,” he says. “I worked a whole semester on a housing scheme and didn’t have to design a facade. I was interested in the architectural expression of a building but that wasn’t something that was being talked about.”




Peter Märkli



His frustration prompted him to seek out two older figures with whom he could conduct that conversation. One was the architect Rudolf Olgiati — father of Valerio — whose work sought to reconcile his twin interests: the plasticity of late Le Corbusier and the vernacular architecture of the Swiss alps. The other was the sculptor Hans Josephsohn, with whom Märkli would later collaborate on La Congiunta, a museum designed to house a series of Josephsohn sculptures. “The ground plans, he couldn’t understand well,” Märkli says. “But he could talk very exactly about the graphic effect of my facades. He would tell me if I had too much wall over a window.”
Archaic sources

As a student Märkli encountered the work of the modern masters but struggled to engage with it. “It was 10 years before I could talk about Le Corbusier,” he says today. “I first had to look at more elementary things”.
He found these in the architecture of ancient Greece and of the Romanesque period. Through study of these archaic sources, he developed an understanding of architectural grammar from which he began to develop a voice of his own — ironically, a journey of self-discovery that carries strong overtones of Le Corbusier’s own beginnings.
At the end of last year he delivered a lecture at the architecture department of London Metropolitan University. He devoted the first half to observations about the ancient architecture that remains his principal touchstone, the second to his own work. In a modest but unashamedly didactic tone he spoke for a whole four hours.
“God has given us the sea and the mountains and we human beings have created several languages,” he told his student audience. “To be able to communicate you need to know the rules of these languages. Also in architecture. It is not possible that you can work with form as you like.”


Underpinning such Moses-like pronouncements, one sensed a heartfelt conviction that architecture’s capacity to embody civilising values was being squandered amid the Babel of private languages that constitutes the contemporary architecture scene.
For almost 20 years Märkli practised largely on his own. Most years he would complete just one project, few of them larger than a house. The past five years, however, have seen a dramatic escalation in the scale of his output. The key achievements of this period have been the completion of a school in Zurich and an administration building in Basel for the pharmaceutical giant Novartis — both are bona fide masterpieces.
Along with a major office development on Basel’s Picassoplatz, which is due to be completed at the end of this year, these buildings are united in their use of large areas of glazing held within a tersely repeated frame. This expression marks a considerable departure from the free handling of forms that characterised Märkli’s earlier work. He attributes the shift to the increased dimensions of the new projects. “It is very important that you react to the scale,” he says. “You don’t build a small house with the same order as a big house. Today you see some Swiss-German architects who make urban elevations where the windows have a very free order but, for me, that is impossible. You don’t see this free order at a large scale in any kind of art. In other professions you will die if you work in this way.”
As with all Märkli’s work the new buildings are designed in accordance with a proportional system of his own devising which is based on a division of eighths. It is derived from an attempt to integrate the two proportions that guide the design of so much architecture of the ancient past — the 1:7/8 rectangle known as the Triangulum and the 1:5/8 Golden Section.


“I worked a whole semester on a housing scheme and didn’t have to design a facade”


So structured, his facades enjoy an extraordinary sense of measure in which the relative dimensions of a limited number of components have been rigorously considered. The postwar oeuvre of Mies van der Rohe is an obvious reference point for this architecture of frame and glazing but Märkli’s buildings prove responsive to contingencies of brief and urban context to an extent that Mies’s work rarely did. Indeed, Märkli evidently relishes the opportunity to introduce exceptional conditions within his standardised frames.
His design for Im Birch school, which is the largest in Zurich, sits within a new neighbourhood built on former industrial land. Its linear site faces a park to the east and a number of apartment buildings to the west. The masterplan proposed that the building would form a hard edge to the park with all external play areas ranged along the westerly frontage, but Märkli rejected this in favour of a more permeable strategy that offers a range of external spaces of varying levels of intimacy.
Encompassing precinct

He divided the programme between three volumes, two of which are conjoined. Each is positioned inboard of the site boundary, enabling the concrete-faced ground to read as an encompassing precinct. The blocks are precisely sited on this plate, fixing a series of distinct spaces around their perimeter: an entrance court, a football pitch, a running track, an intimately scaled playspace peppered with trees and another designated for infants. All the windows are closed by external shutters when the school is out of use so no fence has been required to circumscribe the site. The blocks are even positioned so as to frame a public route that extends through the middle of the school and into the park beyond.
The facades of all the blocks are uniformly detailed in a precast concrete frame. In places, this reads as a loggia, in others concrete walls are set behind while the openings are most commonly closed by full-height windows framed in aluminium.
“The most open building is the ancient Greek temple,” suggests Märkli. “In the renaissance, an architect like Palladio wanted to have this open expression, but because it is not a god inside his building but a human being, he has to close the columns with a wall and make a window in the wall.”


It is through the artful handling of such “contradictions” that Märkli’s project finds its character. The recessed loggias are employed only on the elevations that address the public route through the site and on the frontage to the entrance court. Their increased depth lends these elevations a grander character than the others — a sense that is enforced by their more vertical proportion and by the fact that they extend a greater distance beyond their outermost concrete piers. Entrances occupy a double bay and are registered by a doubling of the depth of the beam that spans above them. By such light touches a remarkably rich language is extrapolated from the most limited of means. The resulting building exudes a sense of classical dignity which powerfully conveys its public role.
While the budget for the school was bracing, the project that Märkli has constructed for Novartis is an altogether more lavish proposition. His building sits near the edge of the campus where it shares a courtyard with projects by Diener & Diener and Sanaa. It has the most public role of any building on the site, accommodating a visitor centre on its lower storeys, with offices above. Champagne-anodised aluminium mullions and travertine spandrels establish a grid that is much finer than that of the school. The judgment reflects a recognition of the greater density of the fabric within which the Novartis building sits. “I once built an apartment block in a village and made the pillars massive, much bigger than the engineer asked for,” Märkli explains. “That was important to define the peripheral situation, but in the city the pillars and columns can be finer because they have their place in the whole organism.”
Establishing a tension

Märkli’s interest in establishing a tension between the general and the particular is developed in this project through the contributions of a number of collaborators. The front facade is distinguished by an installation by the American artist Jenny Holzer. She has mounted a series of vertical strips in the upper half of the double-height arcade that addresses the courtyard. Each strip supports a column of LEDs, enabling a frieze of moving text to scroll across the building’s face. The text comprises thousands of aphorisms from around the world — a nod to the fact that the visitor centre draws its audience from far and wide.
The interiors are immaculately detailed with figured marble floors and acoustic ceilings in yew veneer. There are echoes of American corporate architecture of the fifties and sixties, but the effect is made strange by the introduction of a number of elements that are foreign to that vocabulary. Principal among these is a geometrically complex banister design by Alex Herter. Made of cast aluminium, it comprises a series of interconnecting posts that combine into a repeated amphora-like form. Further provocative juxtapositions are offered by quasi-ornamental signage, again in cast aluminium, and by the furniture in the public areas that has been sourced from such far-flung locations as Morocco, Mexico and China.
For all the precision of the architectural frame, these interventions lend the building a quality quite at odds with the monoauthored character of the high-modernist workplace. Märkli has left space for the fantasies of other artists and, by implication, for those of the building’s users too. It is a strategy that acknowledges the limitations of the architect’s art while deftly negotiating the fundamental challenge of making work at this scale: that the building be neither relentlessly systematic on the one hand nor wilfully capricious on the other.
Neither of these projects is easy to digest, being as they are concerned with issues that preoccupied architects for centuries — grammar, proportion, propriety, measure — but are discussed only in the most limited terms today. Märkli’s work demonstrates that such interests are far from the preserve of the historicist; indeed it reminds us how central they were to the vision of a figure like Le Corbusier. If we are once again to have an architecture that speaks of values other than the spectacular, it is surely through a return to those concerns that that we will find it. Märkli’s work offers a crucial signpost along that path.

Fonte: bdonline