Diener & Diener

Diener & Diener is an international architecture office located in Basel, Switzerland. They are known for their sophisticated, subtle take on Modernism, which combines intellectually rigorous thinking about urbanism, history and materiality with an unpretentious, practical approach to design. Diener & Diener are well-known in particular for their simple yet sophisticated residential complexes. When they first begin to design these structures, postmodernism was at its height, and it is their commitment to both the aesthetics and the ethics of Modernism that has won them the acclaim of other designers. This volume contains over 40 projects selected by Roger Diener, each of which is illustrated in detail and thoughtfully described. It includes all of their well-known buildings: the unusual materiality of the shimmering glass-clad Novartis Forum 3 in Basel and the copper-wrapped Migros shopping centre in Lucerne, the subtle and harmonious blend of the old and the new in the Swiss Embassy in Berlin and the Centre Pasquart in Biel. The book also includes less well-known but equally seductive projects like the 1998 Swiss Pavilion at the Franfurt Book Fair. Two prominent historians, Martin Steinman and Joseph Abram, have contributed essays on the intellectual foundation of Diener & Diener's work, and the book also includes Roger Diener's own writing. These texts illuminate the relationship that Diener & Diener's work create between architecture and the city and the partnerships they have forged with artists, as well as paying close attention to the formal clarity and innovative details that make Diener & Diener's work so special. The book includes the recent work that has added the virtues of lightness and transparency to the geometric rigor that has long characterized Diener & Diener's work, and which signals an important shift in their design thinking. The inclusion of a wide range of projects, from early apartment buildings in Switzerland to these new projects, currently under construction all over Europe, allows the reader to fully understand the depth and beauty of the work that Diener & Diener has produced over the last 30 years. Author Biography Joseph Abram is a Swiss author and architectural historian who has written widely on modernist architecture. He is a professor at the Ecole nationale superieure d'architecture de Nancy in France. Roger Diener is the principle of Diener & Diener, the architecture firm established by his father, Marcus Diener, in 1948. He has taught at ETH Zurich, where he is a tenured professor for architecture and design, since 1999, and he has been a visiting professor at Harvard's Graduate School for Design, the School of Architecture in Vienna, and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. He has won the Medaille d'Or from the Academie Francais among many other awards, and his work and his writings have both been published exensively. Martin Steinmann is an architect and architectural historian. He is a professor of architecture at ETH Zurich and has taught at ETH Lausanne and MIT in Cambridge. He has written extensively on Swiss modernist architecture and particularly on the Ticino region.