Herzog & de Meuron are the most influential duo in architecture of the last thirty years. Not because they invented a new style — they have no recognisable style in the sense of Zaha Hadid (fluid forms) or Tadao Ando (bare concrete and silence). Their method is different: every project starts from a question about the material. Not “how does this building look?” but “what does this surface do?” Not “what shape is this window?” but “how does this light enter?” It is a phenomenological approach to architecture — an interest in the sensory experience of space before its visual form.
A useful theoretical reference is Josef Albers — the Bauhaus painter famous for his “Homage to the Square” series, in which he studies how colours are perceived differently depending on the colours around them. Herzog trained at EPFL and ETH Zurich, with Aldo Rossi among his teachers; he was not a student of Albers, but Albers's lesson is a useful key to their work: perception is not objective. Two identical surfaces in different contexts look different. Material has no fixed meaning — it has a contextual meaning. From this idea comes all of Herzog & de Meuron's research on materials: screen-printed glass, concrete cast in grass formwork, oxidised copper, woven reeds as cladding, basalt panels.
The Tate Modern
The Tate Modern in London (2000) is the project that made Herzog & de Meuron world-famous. The brief: convert Bankside Power Station — a disused power station on the Thames, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott in the 1940s — into a museum of contemporary art. The fundamental choice: not to demolish and rebuild, but to keep the power station's shell and adapt it. The turbine hall — the enormous room where the generators stood, 35 metres high and 150 long — becomes the great public entrance space, used for art installations on a monumental scale. The museum is organised around this enormous empty space.
The solution is elegant and bold at the same time. It maintains the industrial memory of the building (the chimney, the brick, the proportions of the power station). It inserts a glass volume on top — the “light beam” — which lights up the museum at night like a lighthouse. It creates a museum that does not look like a museum: it looks like a public place that contains art, not a container for art. In twenty years the Tate Modern has become the most visited modern art museum in the world — not only for the art but for the building.
The Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg: the nickname and the story
The Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg (2017) is one of the most discussed contemporary buildings for the wrong reasons: the almost seven years of delay (opening had been planned for 2010), the cost that ballooned from 77 to 789 million euros, the legal disputes between the City of Hamburg, the builders and the practice. But if you go into the building — the great vineyard-shaped concert hall with 2,100 seats, lined entirely with undulating white acoustic panels, each panel different from the others, each curve calculated to diffuse sound — you understand why it cost so much. It is not waste: it is precision.
The building is constructed on top of an old red-brick port warehouse — the same logic as the Tate Modern: a historic building is preserved as the base of a new one. The new part is a glass volume with undulating façades that reflect the port and the sky differently depending on the angle — the glass is not transparent but undulating, and this undulation multiplies the reflections. The combination of the warehouse's red brick and the hall's undulating glass is Herzog & de Meuron's material in its most recent form: not the single elaborate surface, but the dialogue between two materials of different eras.
The Beijing Olympic Stadium
The “Bird's Nest Stadium” (2008) is Herzog & de Meuron's most controversial building — and the most popular. The load-bearing steel structure is visible from outside: steel beams interweave in an apparently chaotic way, like the branches of a nest. But the weave is not random — it is the structure itself, which requires these beams to distribute the loads. The decoration is the structure. The structure is the decoration. It is Sullivan's principle applied to contemporary steel. The stadium has been criticised for its cost and for its authoritarian context — legitimate criticisms. But the plazas around the stadium, designed together with the building, are heavily used by Beijing's citizens at weekends. Quality architecture survives the political context — it does not justify it, but it outlives it.