BUREAU

Flora Alpina

2026-02-27T18:40:00+00:00

°°°
Open garden, scenography, exhibition and furniture design
For The House of Switzerland
Milano, Italy
Olympic and Paralympic games
825 m²
Images by Dylan Perrenoud

Gardens are about gathering a certain group of plants to create compositions and experiences in a precise and living environment. But notonly. As a precise representation of the world, they gather living and non-living features.

Flora AlpinaOpen gardenSwitzerland is a garden. If we consider that the political borders are the real edge of a country, then Switzerland can accept the definition ofan “Hortus Conclusus” the Latin term that defines the garden origin in occident. As any garden, it has limits, it is well defined yet porous andopen to the elements, to life coming in and out of it, to climate, wind, sun, rain.Most cultures have developed gardens as representational fragments of the world. If the most well known in occident are Japanese, Frenchand English, there are numerous cultural variations of this historic typology.Gardens are about gathering a certain group of plants to create compositions and experiences in a precise and living environment. But notonly. As a precise representation of the world, they gather living and non-living features. Rocks and architectural follies, for example, are verywell-known characters of different garden cultures. These follies exist to accompany the experience, enhance or articulate certain moments,sceneries and create small shelter that can trigger imaginary moments.As a three-dimensional representation, gardens have a very strong relation to the art world with the particularity of an art that has to dialoguewith living creatures, the world of plants. These porous enclosed spaces appeal the imaginary, as they are an extract of the world, yet theycreate a distance from it, to meditate, reflect, observe differently, as a small step aside.It is following this understanding of gardens that the Flora Alpina garden emerges. Within the Centro Svizzero’s courtyard, an alpine gardenis at the heart of the installation of the House of Switzerland. Symbolically, it addresses the alpine culture that links two countries,Switzerland and Italy, as many others. Through this thematic approach, it proposes an experience to be lived during the Winter Olympic andParalympic games.

House of Switzerland is a garden. For a short moment, two weeks, it will be the center of a variable community that comes to celebrate thegames or just to hung around and live this singular moment in the center of Milano before they find another place to stay. This other life isimbedded in the design process. The garden-house proposes a certain mood, rather gay, for a welcoming moment. Precis décor andpatterns, colored modules that host diverse functions: stage, tribunes, bleachers, kiosks, market stalls. Other freely drawn patterns becomelighting features, supported by the famous Milano street panettones that the town knows so well. They are part of a family of furniture:seating stools, tables, signage support.The garden also develops inside, within the existing restaurant space, the Swiss Corner. The photographic artwork of Dylan Perrenoudembraces the visitor with a series of lightboxes showing mysterious rock pieces and composed flora universes coming from an ancientcollection of slides of the 1980s. Facing the lightboxes, a collection of 140 potted physical flowers is displayed within the depth of the showwindows. The existing character of the space helps to create a multiplicity of reflexions that are pushed further to the exterior façade wherethe relation to the street is redefined.Flora Alpina is designed for seamless adaptability, drawing inspiration from the vital role of flowers in sports, medicine, and culture.Plants are healing, plants and flowers are Olympic signatures, celebrative and discreet. They accompany medals and smiles ofachievement. They help us rejoice, live and breathe.

Project: Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide
Concept design: Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta
Competition: Finia Sonderegger, Valentin Racine, Beatriz Duarte, Carla Stein
Project execution: Daniel Zamarbide | Carine Pimenta (project managers), Niklas Schuknecht, Beatriz Duarte, Maria do Mar Cavaleiro
Construction supervision: Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide, Maria do Mar Cavaleiro
Publication drawings: Yannis Tsourlos, Beatriz Duarte
Context: Scenography, exibition and furniture design
Location: Milano, Italy
Program: “House of Switzerland” for the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in Milano-Cortina 2026
Area: 825 m2
Status: Completed, 02-2026
Client: Presence Switzerland
Producer: Altofragile
Graphic design: BASE design

Posted in projects

Garage Encounters

2026-01-23T12:49:00+00:00

°°°
2025
Semi-permanent scenography, exhibition and furniture design
MAC/CCB – Museum of Contemporary Art and Architecture Centre
Lisbon, Portugal
2200 m²
Images by Dylan Perrenoud

One of the many misconceptions that has preoccupied the world of architecture in recent decades is that architecture’s noble existence occurs only in thebuilt world.

Buildings, in this narrative, are what constitute the real heart and body of the field. Everything else is anecdotal, peripheral, decorative, some would say with atouch of condemnation. If Carlo Scarpa’s work is remembered, it is not for what he did for most of his life and what he was truly dedicated to: Exhibitiondesign, as Philippe Duboy has shown in his book “Carlo Scarpa, L’Art d’Exposer” (Les Presses du Réel). Making exhibitions was a political commitment in aparticularly complex cultural moment in Italy, as was making wallpaper for William Morris in Victorian England.Others, like Lilly Reich, have literally disappeared from most architectural books, hidden behind a “master”.Exhibitions are public spaces. Everyone is allowed in to experience, discuss, learn or be informed about certain topics. If museums are the institutionalcontainers of these public moments, exhibitions are the operational, public “rendez-vous” where the content is displayed and shared and where people hangout, come and go to be stimulated.There is no absolute truth in the way exhibition spaces have evolved, from classical museums with walls of colorful tapestries to today’s conventional whitecube. They are all part of a history that can revitalize today’s rather standardized exhibition spaces.Within the diversity of possibilities, within the vast number of great exhibition spaces, some of them have come to Garagem Sul. They have landed in Lisbonto celebrate a contemporary, serious but relaxed way of looking at what is supposed to be a cultural institution. How should an institution be defined? Does itneed a clear definition?Here is a small gathering of friends of space, some large and imposing, some modest and intimate. They have come to the Garagem party: Serralves fromPorto, John Soane from London, El Prado from Madrid, the Uffizi from Florence. Fragments of multiple histories lived by millions. Displaced and re-enacted,they become less institutional, perhaps a little less stiff. To prove their informality, they show their organs. Backstage and frontstage are part of a nondichotomicensemble. The technical and the representational are also merged in a single attitude to focus on the process of making, as in HaraldSzeemann’s 1969 exhibition in Bern, “When Attitude Becomes Form”.And to a great percentage, the whole construction has used passed exhibition materials, re-enacting cultural moments and reclaiming existing elements fromthe space’s history.

And to a great percentage, the whole construction has used passed exhibition materials, re-enacting cultural moments and reclaiming existing elements fromthe space’s history.But before the party, and to give all these friends a proper welcome, the place was tidied up. Cleared of a number of elements that had appeared throughoutthe history of the architecture center. Natural light was there, but covered, inaccessible, hidden. And the original materials and configurations had suffered thenormal layering of time.The exhibition that inaugurates this space is far from neutral: Interspecies. One that opens the world of architecture to necessary more-than-humanapproaches and attitudes. If many actresses and actors have been invisible in architectural history, other-than-humans were practically inexistent.The garage will then be ready to welcome wonderers of all kinds, to walk with history and the infinite stories that make it up.Daniel ZamarbideLisbonSpring 2025

Project: BUREAU (Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide)
Concept design: Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta
Project execution: Daniel Zamarbide / Carine Pimenta (project managers), Lujza Lehocká, Finia Sonderegger, Valentin Racine, RomaneGuillou
Construction supervision: Carine Pimenta
Publication drawings: Valentin Racine
Context: Transforming Garagem Sul (80% reused materials) to host “Interspecies” public program
Location: MAC/CCB – Museum of Contemporary Art and Architecture Centre, Lisbon, Portugal (PT)
Program: Semi-permanent scenography, exhibition and furniture design
Area: 2200 m2
Photography: Dylan Perrenoud
Curator: Mariana Pestana
Producers: Ideawood, Metalúrgica Frontal
Graphic design: Joana Lourencinho

Posted in projects

Phare Ylliam

2025-12-04T13:30:00+00:00

°°°
Geneva Lake, Switzerland
Lighthouse
160 m²
Winter 2025
Images by Dylan Perrenoud

Few programmes offer such strong and evocative poetic substance as a lighthouse. The lighthouse is a place and an object that inspiresreverie, the imagination of distant places but also of return, of a landmark, a symbol of safety after stormy voyages. The lighthouse is the very embodiment of what it carries, of why it exists: to carry and bring light.

This unitary object is inevitably and closely linked to specific landscape conditions, often very beautiful, since the lighthouse is located at the edge of the landmasses, becoming the last – or first – vertical sign that the maritime traveller will see upon returning from their journey.The context of the Geneva harbour may not offer the dramatic landscapes that we generally associate with this iconic silhouette. It is therefore in the calm of the Geneva Lake landscape that the Lighthouse will emphasise this undeniable beauty. The project thus deliberately confirms its vocation as infrastructure. In a way, it rejects the figurative, stereotypical and well-established architectural presence of the iconic lighthouse, replacing it with an infrastructural presence set against a landscape of riprap.The lighthouse is a tribute to the hyperboloid structures of Vladimir Shukhov, the Soviet engineer of the early 20th century. The Adziogol lighthouse is just one of his many explorations of ultra-light structures of this type. This lightness seemed perfectly suited to the context of Geneva waterfront. A mirage, an architecture made of landscape and transparency,where the lighthouse is not an object but a structure, an artefact that plays with its appearance and disappearance, its evanescence in the sky. In contrast to this vertical lightness, it stands on a solid, mineral, anchored base. It rises, literally, from a rocky base, a modified version of the mineral blocks found throughout the harbour.

The site, silent and delicate, presents a unique opportunity to create a landscape, to accentuate this point of extension into the lake with a strong and well-placed development that serves as a support for the lighthouse structure. The experience of the place will thus be multifaceted and rich, both outside and inside the new construction. Indeed, the three floors of the proposal offer a variety of experiences. In the base, a living space, there is a panoramic view and a protected interior, centred on a long panorama window. This interior evokes the magical constructions of the artist turned architect César Manrique in Lanzarote. In the upper cabin, a compact and efficient boat cabin experience overlooks the lake and offers a full panoramic view.The final important element of the project is a dynamic lantern. The light fixture can be raised and lowered using a guidance systemincorporated into the pillars and structure of the lighthouse. The lighthouse thus offers a set of dynamic landscape and structural elements that can interact with the lake and the harbour, with the distant, the near and the intimate.

Project: BUREAU (Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide)
Concept design: Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide
Competition: Jolan Haidinger, Chiara Pezzetta, Ignacio Martínez Pendás, Laëtitia Chauveau, Matilde Mozzi, Inés Acito
Project execution: Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Pierre Musy
Construction supervision: Daniel Zamarbide, Pierre Musy
Publication drawings: Pierre Musy, Valentin Racine
Context: Competition for the Lighthouse at the end of the north jetty of the port of the Société Nautique de Genève
Location: Geneva Lake, Geneva, Switzerland (CH)
Program: Lighthouse - Cold infrastructure
Gross floor area: 160 m²
Usable floor area: 120 m²
Status: Completed, 05-2025
Photography: Dylan Perrenoud
Client: Société Nautique de Genève
Engineer : Schnetzer Puskas
Specialists and Building Companies: Karakas & Français, Ecoservices, Haller Wasser + partner, Ruch Metallbau + Panoramah, Orllati, Fulliquet & Tansini, Puchat, CS Stores

Posted in projects

Permeable species

2025-07-07T12:25:00+01:00

°°°
2024
Teaching at MAIA - Master of Arts in Interior Architecture
Assisted by David Viladomiu Ceballos
Images by Dylan Perrenoud

Permeable Species is part of a larger research series that the BUREAU (Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide) will develop over the years and that started in the Laval School of Architecture in Canada in 2023. Under the name Nous Avons Failli Commencer Sans Vous (we almost started without you) this research attempts to study the spatial conditions that may allow us to rethink, revisit and upgrade our relations to other species. We explore possibilities of cohabitation and experiment with non- conventional ways and tools to produce architectural and design pieces.

The studio Permeable Species is dedicated to designing co-habitational spaces where we include ourselves as humans, as bodies, as permeable beings within multiple and constitutional relations that form us and that we are part of. The studio does this by working in companionship and neighborhood relation with other species. Every student partners with a companion species and develop his.her own relation with them, designing as well the spaces for this relation.‍We work with two research media: film and a manufactured object. One virtual, one physical. Both need craft, careful making. Both are thought as media to develop a story to be told, shown.‍Projects in the studio are seen as stories, Speculative Fabulations (Donna Haraway) that tackle urgent realities. It is urgent to think of ourselves otherwise, as multiple and as part of a different world balance, more Gaian (Lovelock, Margulis). The spaces that we live in, practice, perform, activate, they need to be redefined in relation to the multiplicity of being. They have to open up, to be porous, permeable.‍The conceptual frame of the studio is tied with a very tangible and material approach. In the studio ideas exist only when they reach a material form. The studio is fundamentally thought as a space for making, a workshop. Spontaneous intuition is favored in order to tackle as fast as possible how projects materialize. In this sense, the speculative aspect of the studio is filled up with material, technical and non-abstract pragmatism. Students and team are to work acknowledging very well how things are made and what things are made of. re to work acknowledging very well how things are made and what things are made of.

Context :

MAIA – Master of Arts in Interior Architecture - Interior Ecologies

Students :

Giada Pettenati
Karol Szmigielski
Kim Sherin Schönauer
Larisa Coman
Lina Zoe Laube
Lisa Schober
Mariannina Thielemans
Mariia Fomina

Project by Lina Zoe Laube

Plaza

2025-03-23T13:37:00+00:00

°°°
Geneva, Switzerland
Temporary and reusable cinema
36 m²
Images by Federal Studio

A temporary and reusable cinema for the Fondation Plaza at Art-Genève.Reenacting the Quonset Hut.

It is an interesting coincidence that the military unit known as the Quonset Hut took its name from a First Nation term and location. QuonsetPoint is simply the name of a small peninsula in Rhode Island that was occupied by the Algonquins until colonization. Would it be too muchof a coincidence to suggest that the meaning of the word in Algonquian, “small, long place”, may have determined the nature of theprefabricated Quonset hut? It is, after all, a small, long, expandable dwelling unit. If this idea were to be followed, it could somehow beassimilated to an industrial version of the many types of First Nation longhouses, a dwelling for semi-temporary settlements that is based ona logic of assembly rather than construction. The unit can be seen as the result of an ‘installational’ rather than a constructional attitude. It isassembled or installed for a season, then dismantled and moved elsewhere as a kit of parts that can be packed and transported to hostcommunities in possible and available sites as the seasons pass.

The Quonset hut, in this narrative, would be a transportable house derived from an autochthonous tradition and reinterpreted in a militarycontext by the new metal folding technologies of the 1940s. The wooden arches and cork or wooden coverings of the longhouses aretransformed into corrugated metal sheets over metal beams that would travel the world to house the pieces of American soldiers’ livesoutside their homes.

The Plaza Foundation is a cultural institution in the making, dedicated to cinema and architecture, housed in one of the most emblematicbuildings of Geneva (Switzerland) of its time, a large urban complex in which the architect Marc Joseph Saugey designed one of his mostimportant public interiors: the Cinéma Plaza, inaugurated in 1952. The architect, who was fascinated by cinema and technologicalinnovation in general, was a great admirer of American culture and industrial manufacturing.Before the renovated cinema, hotel and restaurant are unveiled in 2026, the Plaza Foundation wants to show its cultural proposals andprogram through a small nomadic movie house that represents the spirit of the Foundation.

The Quonset Plaza somehow absorbs and establishes lines of dialogue with three different cultural moments: the Algonquin longhouses,the Quonset huts of the 1940s and, finally, Saugey’s love for the American prefabrication and industrial technologies of the 1950s. Inside,an isolated interior is detached from its surroundings to allow immersion and captivation, to facilitate the possibility of grasping other realitiesthrough cinema.By transforming the very material of this stereotypical North American landscape icon, its identity suddenly becomes ambiguous,somewhere between an inhabitable model and a stage set, an abstraction and a domestic public space. Architectural artefact? Image?Mirage?

Project: BUREAU (Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide)
Concept design: Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta
Project execution: Daniel Zamarbide (project manager), Carine Pimenta, Pierre Musy, Valentin Racine
Construction supervision: Daniel Zamarbide, Galliane Zamarbide
Publication drawings: Valentin Racine
Context: Temporary – reusable – installation for Art Genève 2025, Palexpo
Location: Geneva, Switzerland (CH)
Photography: Régis Golay, FEDERAL studio
Main contractor: La Porch
Curator: Elise Lammer

Posted in projects

Short Stories Book

2025-03-18T16:25:00+00:00

°°°
Winter 2024
240 pages, 338 color and 22 b/w illustrations
16 x 24 cm
Park Books publisher
Graphic design by Norm, Zürich
Images by Fábio Cunha

Short Stories is the first survey of our work to date. Brief texts—some narrative, some descriptive, illustrated with 360 images, are contributed by architects and researchers Fabrizio Gallanti, Zaccharie Lachance, André Tavares, and Marina Otero Verzier; curator and critic Tirdad Zolghadr; designer and curator Alexandra Midal; and Daniel Zamarbide. A conversation between designers and researchers Amir Halabi and Ava Violich-Kennedy, Carine Pimenta, and Daniel & Galliane Zamarbide. Designed by Norm.

To order your copy, IT’S HERE.

Posted in new, projects

Screens

2025-03-17T12:50:00+00:00

°°°
Exhibition design
Lisbon, Portugal
Autumn 2022
Lisbon Architecture Triennale 2022
Culturgest exibition space
685 m²
Images by Francisco Nogueira

With a certain dose of naivety, we approach the exhibition “Visionaries” with a sense of discovery, attempting to penetrate the minds of collective and individual will.

The imaginary, forever trapped in the complex meanders of brain mechanics is violently confronted with realized actions, constructed worlds and territories, some intimate, some of enormous dimensions and problematic agendas.The curtains open the stage; they suggest that something important is at stake, and that it might exist a backstage where this “something” is being cooked.

Freely borrowing the beautifully tangled mind of another visionary, Mr. Lynch himself, we propose a standard of the hidden and whispered, the curtain, as an all-over operation that we find at the most noble origins of modernist architecture, believing that the undeclared revolution of Mies van der Rohe spaces resides in Lilly Reich’s textile and spatial partitions of the 1927 temporary Café Samt & Seide.

The too defined and troubling architecture of the Culturgest building seems perfect to host a lynchian world of continuous thresholds. A clash of aesthetics to be delicately assembled together, side by side, in order to hide and show a collection of incredible trans-scalar projects. The curtain as clothing (the intimate), the curtain as room (the Wunderkammer), the curtain as space-framing (the theatre stage) and finally the curtain as a gate to surprising encounters with unexpected works.

Screens connects as well with the history of projections, pictures, tableaux of all kinds. Weather painted, printed, projected, filled up or left empty, the walls and floors are supports to frame art and diverse documentation. They are staged or blank frames hosting a variety of works and supports. A collection of “surrogates” (Allan McCollum) frames.

Project : BUREAU (Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide)
Concept design: Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta
Project execution: Carine Pimenta, Matilde Mozzi (project managers), Katerina Gkimizoudi, Malak Abdelhady, Amir Halabi
Construction supervision: Carine Pimenta, Amir Halabi
Publication drawings: Alain Van Garderen
Location: Lisbon, Portugal (PT)
Context / Program: Temporary Exhibition for Lisbon Architecture Triennale 2022 at Culturgest
Exhibition : Visionaries / Visionáriascurated by Anastassia Smirnova

Posted in projects

Book Launch

2024-10-25T09:12:00+01:00

We are very happy to invite you to the book launch of our monographic publication SHORT STORIES, published by Park Books.

It has been a long journey and a considerable work with the incredible participation of great contributors to six texts and an interview, and the invaluable work of graphic designer Manuel Krebs (NORM). The book is enlightened by the photographic magic of our dear Dylan Perrenoud. We are doing a series of Book Launches before the end of the year as a series of conversations with some people and colleagues that we really appreciate and have accepted to be with us.

The first one will happen at HEAD Genève, Bâtiment E, where we are teaching now. Monday the 18th of NOVEMBER at 18h00.We will be sharing this moment with Danaé Panchaud, Director of the CPG (Centre de la Photographie - Genève), Alia Bengana, architecte and lecturer at the Architecture School of Fribourg as well As Javier Fernandez Contreras, ass. Prof and director of the Interior Architecture department at HEAD Genève.

The second book launch will take place at the Bookshop Never Stop Reading in Zurich. Thursday, November 28, 2024 7 pm. We will be sharing this moment with Carlotta Darò and Manuel Krebs.

If you want to have your own copie of the book, click here.

The following dates:
18.11.2024 at HEAD - Genève
28.11. 2024 at Never Stop Reading in ZURICH
05.12.2024 at the CCA in MONTREAL
12.05.2025 at INSTITUTO in PORTO
Coming soon - Lisbon

Posted in news, publications

Séraphin of Urtsadzor

2024-09-26T09:53:00+01:00

°°°
Urtsadzor, Armenia
Collective design for a multi-species shelter
9 m²
Design and construction with students
3rd piece of the trilogy of Derborence
with NPATAK Platform
Images by Dylan Perrenoud

During the summer of 2024, an interesting experience was carried out in the Armenian Caucasus mountains. A group of people somewherein a very rocky and wild environment gathered to construct an undefined and seemingly useless multi-species artefact. They waked up at5.30 am every morning, worked under an intense heating sun on an improvised construction site, prepared meals together three times aday, played football in the evening and sometimes danced at night. There were some wild dogs always around, horses as well, a couple ofvultures close to where they were building, invisible and dangerous snakes, wonderful mantises. They seemed happy and tired. From far,the experience felt absurd and beautiful at the same time.

A brief introduction to their activities, from inside.A novel, first of all, a fictional story based on a historical event that happened in another part of the world: Switzerland. The novel is titledDerborence, written by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz in the early 20th century, and tells the story of a village community that suffered theconsequences of a landslide. The novel is based on a historical event that happened in 1714 and caused the death of 15 people and 170animals. Significantly, the death of animals was also recorded.This novel has given birth to an architectural trilogy initiated by BUREAU (Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide). One firstpiece was constructed in a sculpture park in the Swiss mountains. The second in an art community in France. The third one, in theCaucasus Mountains in Armenia.

This last member of the trilogy is particular as it is not the result of a design by the Swiss-Portuguese architects but is a co-authored piece from BUREAU, NPATAK and 15 Armenian and international students, conceived and realized in a three weeks workshop in Yerevan, at the Library For Architecture for the first 5 days, and in the territory of the Caucasus Wildlife Refuge, a 30’000 hectares land of protected wildlife in South Caucasus.The process and result are part of a pedagogical approach that intends to dissolve thinking and making as part of a same undertaking.Architecture is mostly a theoretical practice, ironically quite detached from the physical part of construction. Since the renaissance, the architect has evolved away from the construction site, his.her main activity occurring today behind a computer. Historian Marvin Trachtenberg has marvelously described this decisive turning point in his book Building in Time. With a very different angle, sociologist Richard Sennet has made his own written trilogy - homo faber: The Craftsman, Together, Building and Dwelling - on this topic as well, developing a provocative idea that craft is really what matters when it comes to creative thinking-making. Pursuing the reasoning of Sennet, the foundational principle of the workshop was the following: People participate to the production of theworld they live in, and they do so through conversing with the world, among themselves and with other living beings with who they share the environment. The workshop has been thus thought as a dialogical tool, a way to establish a dialogical exchange within a group of people who gather voluntarily together with the goal of designing and building something.The “something” is important but does not need to have a particular definition other than the fact of being open, porous and multi-species. Ashelter, a mound, a reference point, a small environment that can be of some support for a diversity of fragments of lives that will occur in, or around it. The use of straw and rock provides shelter for those living creatures of various sizes.

The “building”, as a verb and as an act, is important as well. It says something about the temporary community that have had to organize as a group to think, eat, work, play, exchange together for three weeks in a quite isolated context. The consideration that a more than human population could somehow inhabit Séraphin of Urtsadzor has been very present in the development and making of the artefact. The function, or what in architectural culture is often referred as “program” is left open in this case. No specific usage but potentially a multiplicity of them. The object can be considered as multi-scalar as it welcomes and takes into account a diversity of inhabitants.

Text by Daniel Zamarbide

A collective design and construction by:
Amir Halabi, Andranik Yeremyan, Ani Khachatryan, Ani Vahramyan, Arineh Keshishi(NPATAK), Arpi Hovhannisyan, Carine Pimenta (BUREAU), Daniel Zamarbide (BUREAU), Edita Arakelyan, Galliane Zamarbide(BUREAU), George Kyupelyan, Hamlet Mkhoyan, Hayk Shahinyan (NPATAK), Iker Zamarbide, Irina Martirosyan, Jeremy Morris(BUREAU), Karen Berberyan (NPATAK), Leo Yuan, Lujza Lehocká, Margarita Astvatsatryan, Pierre Musy (BUREAU), SamToman, Todor Rusev
+++
Publication drawings:
Todor Rusev
+++

Posted in projects, academic

Cornell University / Studio Florian Idenburg

2024-03-04T11:29:00+00:00

Cornell University, Architecture Art Planning
Winter 2024
Critics jury, Studio Professor Florian Idenburg

We are very pleased to have taken part in the final reviews at Cornell University invited by Professor Florian Idenburg of SO-IL architecture.

Posted in academic, news

Book / Let the wind take care of everything

2024-02-18T11:53:00+00:00

EPFL, Alice Studio and CEPV, Switzerland
Winter 2024
Mörel Editor

Over a period of five years, photography students from the advanced training in photography at the Centre d’Enseignement Professionnel de Vevey (CEPV) engaged in parallel exploration with students from the Atelier de la Conception de l’Espace (ALICE) in the school of architecture at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, forging complementary discourses about image making.

Each book is one of a kind. Every copy is unique, each one presenting different pairing of images and text in a different order.

Link: morelbooks.com

Posted in news, academic

Princeton University / Studio Michael Meredith

2023-11-30T10:48:00+00:00

Princeton University’s School of Architecture, USA
Automne 2023
Discussion, Studio Professor Michael Meredith

Thanks to the students of Princeton University’s School of Architecture for the very interesting discussions and exchanges and thanks to Michael Meredith for the invitation.

Posted in academic, news

Maison Molaire

2023-10-30T15:22:00+00:00

°°°
Geneva, Switzerland
Winter 2023
Transformation, interior design and furniture design
120 m²
Images by Dylan Perrenoud

The exploration of domestic spaces goes on, working on creative variations of supports and stages for the everyday life.

The exploration of domestic spaces goes on, working on creative variations of supports and stages for the everyday life. If there is anything like a standard family, statistically it would be this one: cohabitants of a given space, not necessarily coming from the same parenthood. They have different rhythms, different lives. They meet and spend time together at home, they navigate between different homes. The houses are thus both temporarily and permanently occupied. Kids and adults come and go. And at one point everyone is adult and the uses of the spaces need re-definition, reconfiguration. But we started the sentence with “if there is”. Actually, there is not. The recognition of simple inhabitation diversities does not seem to own a place in architectural standards, legal and cultural ones. Houses are still considered in its vast majority as static places for normalized families that our profession likes to classify in types. The thousands of apartments that are thought and built under official norms and regulation follow a very determined image of the family. Is this image programmatic?

As everyone knows and experiences, life is quite bumpy or even unpredictable at times. How do homes and houses absorb these expected movements of life? What architect Mary Otis Stevens described as the Flux of Human Life is just our very natural way of being, of grouping and ungrouping temporarily or permanently. Does the elasticity of the inhabitants as a group find spatial responses in our homes?

In the case of this apartment, a former dentist cabinet, the attempt is to welcome that “flux” and stay open, to keep the possibilities of spatial evolution exposed to what might happen in time. The existing base helps. The small building was designed for a mix use of modest artist’s studios, commercial and living spaces in the early 1980s. The space is structurally free, letting the light in through 2 transversal skylights, perpendicular to the important north-oriented openings. The very idea of openness translates into a physical experience as not much is walled. Spaces, confinement and the needed feeling of gentle enclosures are defined by other means other than partitions. Informed and inspired by the great work of Lilly, the architecture of curtains primarily takes care of the organization of the spaces. Curtains and glazed surfaces arrange the possibilities of perceiving and impeding, opening, closing and other in-between situations. The full house becomes a sort of perceptive shifting machine as textiles, furniture and light unfold at ease, provoking different situations, visual and experiential. The domestic material experience is mainly wrapped up in industrial wood panels, obsessively used floors and necessary partitions. Furniture, objects, carpets built-in elements, are dealt with as if everything was alive, less as a gesamkunstwerk than as a dynamic theater stage without spectators where everything is part of a relation, a conversation, moving and displacing around at any moment. The possibility of disorder is present at all times.

Daniel ZamarbideGenevaAutumn 2023

Project by
BUREAU - Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide
+++
Concept design
Daniel Zamarbide, Galliane Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta
+++
Project execution
Daniel Zamarbide, Jolan Haidinger, Katerina Gkimizoudi
+++
Construction supervision
Daniel Zamarbide, Galliane Zamarbide
+++
Publication drawings
Taïma Matthes, Eleni Charcharidou

Posted in projects

Harvard University - GSD / Studio Hiroto Kobayashi

2023-10-25T17:45:00+01:00

Harvard University, GSD, USA
Automne 2023
Final reviews jury, Professor Hiroto Kobayasi

We are very pleased to have taken part in the finals reviews at Harvard University invited by Professor Hiroto Kobayashi.

Posted in academic, news

Epfl Alice lab - Resonances 2

2023-10-16T22:52:00+01:00

°°°
A project by Alice (Atelier de la Conception de l’Espace)
EPFL - Switzerland
June 2023
built in Geneva
Images by Dylan Perrenoud
Daniel Zamarbide - Host Professor and Co-Director of ALICE
With Dieter Dietz - Director of ALICE
and Teresa Cheung - year 1 Academic Head

Ressonances 2 is an educational architectural project - a collaboration to build a utopia. The project was born at ALICE, the architecture laboratory of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), and developed over three years in various locations in Europe. Its aim is to redefine the architectural profession, its tools and its involvement with society.

After exploring the theme of the territory, ALICE is starting a new three-year educational cycle in September 2022, called Résonance, which focuses on materials and reuse. All the installations will be designed to last, using wood and earth produced using the pisé technique. The wood comes either from old buildings or from Geneva sawmills, and the earth from local building sites. The pavilions and large installations of previous years are being replaced by smaller, scattered structures that will serve as sources of inspiration for the projects of students in future years. They will be able to adapt to the needs and uses of the public over time.

Posted in academic

Superposition magazine

2023-10-02T20:32:00+01:00

°°°
September 2023
Collaboration for Issue II

We are very happy to be part of the last issue of Superposition magazine.

Issue 2, Workout, is guest edited by Freek Persyn and contains contributions by 51N4E, ANY, Feyikemi Bello, Matthew Blunderfield, BUREAU, Luigi Alberto Cippini, Max Creasy, Alessandro Cugola, Wayne Daly, Natassa Dourida, Ewa Effiom, Ehrl Bielicky, Bianca Felicori, Javier Fernandez Contreras, Jes Fernie, Fredi Fischli+Niels Olsen, Takeshi Hayatsu, Chioma Ebinama, Valeriia Karaman, David Klemmer, Roxane Le Grelle, Jonas Løland, Marbledworks, Nifemi Marcus-Bello, Johnston Marklee, Joan Membrive, MOS, Hikaru Nissanke, Valentina Noce, OK-RM, Elizabeth Orr, Freek Persyn, Grace Prince, Point Supreme, PoOr Collective, Benedetta Tagliabue, Helen Thomas, Leonidas Trampoukis andSchneider Türtscher, as well as an insert developed between Superposition, Newrope, 51N4E and OK-RM.

Posted in news, publications

Lecture / The soul of stone / Verona

2023-09-28T15:06:00+01:00

28 September 2023
Platform architecture and design + Marmomac
Verona Italy
°°°

We are pleased to be part of the last collaboration between PLATFORM and MARMOMAC for the the most important world fair dedicated to the entire stone production chain.The architecture magazine hosts ‘The Soul of Stone‘ talk at Marmomac and accompanies its presence with an international delegation of architects and product designers. Their presence aims to promote innovation, forge new connections, and inspire the future of design.

Link: marmomac.com

A lecture by BUREAU
Carine Pimenta and Pierre Musy

Posted in news

Lecture / Architecture Festival Armenia

2023-08-03T16:47:00+01:00

4-6 August 2023
Architecture Festival Armenia 2023
°°°

BUREAU is delighted to be taking part in the Armenia 2023 Architecture Festival alongside So-IL, Kosmos and BIG. Organized by the Npatak Foundation, the festival takes place from August 3 to 6 2023 in Yerevan, Armenia.

NPATAK is an initiative group, formed by three architects with international education and experience in 2021, that initiates and conducts various activities in the field of architectural education in Armenia.

Posted in news, academic

Talk / PERFORMING DIPLOMACY / IHEID Geneva

2023-05-24T16:17:00+01:00

°°°
24 Mai 2023
Discussion
IHEID Geneva Switzerland

BUREAU is pleased to take part in the discussion taking place on 24 May 2023 at the Graduate Geneva Institute on the diplomacy of public spaces.

PERFORMING DIPLOMACY, MAKING SPACE PUBLIC: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY DISCUSSION BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE, PERFORMING ARTS AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Architects, designers, performing artists and social scientists reflect today on the material infrastructures that empower the public, allowing them to voice their desires and exchange opinions in local, national or transnational arenas and contexts. This panel will highlight three types of projects related to the construction of publics and diplomatic fora, starting with the new ephemeral public space in construction by the EPFL school of architecture and its students in the vicinity of the Place des nations. Then, it will move onto performances based on simulations of environmental diplomacy proposed by the Rimini Protokoll. The panel will end with forthcoming interdisciplinary experiments at the frontier of international relations and design studies.

Link to the event

Introduction:
Marie-Laure Salles, Director, Geneva Graduate Institute
Grégoire Mallard, Director of Research, Geneva Graduate Institute
Discussion:
Daniel Zamarbide (EPFL): “Crafted Architectures and Experiential Attitudes: Actions and Consequences in the era of ChatGPT”
Stefan Kaegi (Rimini Protokol): “Performing Diplomacy”
Anna Leander (Geneva Graduate Institute): “Humanitarian Futures: Designing International Relations Differently?”

Posted in news, academic

Selenite Dreams

2023-05-23T02:54:00+01:00

°°°
transformation of the spaces dedicated to temporary exhibitions
Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet
Le Brassus, Switzerland
February 2022
24 m²
Images by Dylan Perrenoud

Plaster, the extracted form of gypsum, essentially composed of calcium sulphate dihydrate, appears as a good figuration of the BUREAU’s general attitude towards architecture.

If we were to define ourselves as minor architects, following Jill Stoner’sbook «Towards a minor architecture», working with what is considered a minor material seems quite d’à-propos. It is one thathas been utilised to prefigure and anticipate master pieces in the numerous “galéries des plâtres” around the world, fabricatingfigurative positive moulds of definite sculptures, forever “graved in stone”. The plaster seems more malleable, elastic, fragile.The seemingly banal construction material hides many facets of a rich life, weather as a fundamental discrete companion ofRodin and so many others, as a crystal or as a mental scape beyond the world and in mythological orbits.In yet another form, the material is used for bone fractures, soft tissue injuries, orthopedic diseases and inflammatoryprocesses, to bring peace and rest to wounded parts of the body.In 1939, Salvador Dalí participated to the World of the Tomorrow, a world’s fair that featured the future, with prospectivedesigns from SOM, Norman Bel Geddes and other modernists and visionaries of the time. Dalí provoked the streamlinefuturistic foresight of those avant-garde actors with a surrealist tone and he made it so with a plaster-like architectureanticipating thus installation art, Gesamtkunstwerk works that would largely populate the 20th century art world. Hisintervention, an oneiric pavilion, freely reenacts Botticelli’s painting of Venus and transforms it into a three-dimensional and totalexperience. It constituted minor major piece of architecture that found its way to New York with the advice of no other thanWilliam Morris, father of socialist utopias and wallpapers.A much smaller scale and other rather trivial historical circumstances confronts the modest plaster to a luxurious contextdesigned by a recognized modernist corporate practice of our time: Bjarke Ingels Group. In an exhibition dedicated to the verypresence of materials and its transformation, the art pieces of Nina Beier, Latifa Echakhch, Raphael Hefti, Olivier Laric andChristodoulos Panayiotou (among others), are found in a cave condition that the viewer discovers by diving into a seeminglyundefined white grotto. To stimulate the experience, the existing space is totally transformed to behind the plaster walls andvaults, bringing the visitor into close contact with the art pieces. The usual white cube condition seems to have slightly meltedas an echo to Dali’s delusive art, producing unclear edges in a spatial continuum or topological deformation.Practising architecture in minor mode “requires a partial deconstruction of the structures of power that lead to their incessantreproduction” (Jill Stoner). Given the context, might be a quite (or too?) ambitious agenda for such a quasi-miniatureintervention.

Daniel ZamarbideGenevaWinter 2023

Project : BUREAU (Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide)
Concept design: Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Jolan Haidinger
Project execution: Carine Pimenta (project manager), Jolan Haidinger, Laëtitia Chauveau, Malak Abdelhady
Construction supervision: Daniel Zamarbide, Galliane Zamarbide
Publication drawings: Malak Abdelhady, Rui Da Silva
Context: Temporary Exhibition for Audemars Piguet
Location: Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet, Brassus, Switzerland (CH)

Posted in projects

Lecture / Saïgon Talks 23 / Vietnam

2023-04-13T17:44:00+01:00

°°°
13 April 2023
University of Architecture Ho Chi Minh City
Vietnam
°°°

Bureau is delighted to be taking part in the Saigon talks on April 13, 2023 at Ho Chi Minh University, Vietnam.

Saigon Talks – series of lectures is a free space to question the status-quo and push the confines of what architecture and urban design is said to be. Rich and lively conversations follow on from presentations of the speakers having chosen subjects that they passionately want to share. The audience, involved and active, contribute to the exploration of ides in this environment of study. Through these thought provoking and energetic exchanges, we are able to better understand the evolving nature of user-led design.

Posted in news, academic

Laura

2023-02-22T08:03:00+00:00

°°°
2023
Estremoz rosa marble
Manufactured in Portugal
Table and stool in limited edition
Images by Fábio Cunha

Posted in objects

THERESE

2022-12-26T08:50:00+00:00

°°°
Livable sculpture
Artistic residency “Les Bâtisseurs”
Bermuda, artistic residency and production site
Sergy, France
2022
Images by Dylan Perrenoud

This is a story that began in the Swiss mountains as an echo of the writings of the Swiss novelist Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz. This plot gave birth to Antoine, a peculiar architectural creature that welcomes many nomadic inhabitants and nature enthusiasts since 2014, offering them shelter inside the figure of the boulder. The story continues, becoming a short series with the appearance of a new member, Thérèse, built in 2022.

The novelist, Ramuz, gave a fictional life to the three characters. In their literary existence, they were thrown into a historic, tragic moment for the Swiss mountains that actually occurred in 1714, in the village of Derborence, as a major rock-fall from the Diablerets mountain range killed 15 people and hundreds of animals.

The husband, wife and uncle invented by the author inhabited, from the very beginning, the space of the novel and occupied the imagination of many readers. They have also, over the years, established themselves as cultural landmarks in that region of Switzerland: the novel is part of a regional and historical mountain culture.

With the BUREAU’s involvement in these complex stories, another layer is added. The bodies of the novel’s characters are once again metamorphosed, in this case from the fictional world, to become physical realities with non-human forms. They are transformed into rocks, embracing bodies that enclose flesh-and- bone inhabitants in their interior wooden architecture.

Thérèse emerges from this linage, continuing a multi-layered story that began with Antoine and extends its territorial reach, with the common feature that they both belong to artistic backgrounds. Thérèse’s host context is a piece of land where the artistic community of “Bermuda” has settled and developed its artistic and environmental activities. Antoine was installed in 3-D Sculpture Park (Verbier) in the Swiss Alps.

Thérèse was thought and built along the same lines as Antoine, creating interconnected dependencies of art and other travelling communities. She is part of a territory constituted by networks of interconnected influences and affinities on which we depend, understanding the territory we occupy, but also a series of relational co-habitations. Habitation is political here, as the two shelters are nowhere near commercial or speculative routes or agendas. They offer a place to many outside of any financial or economic considerations, assuming their modesty.

Daniel Zamarbide,Geneva, Winter 2022

With the support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.

Project : BUREAU (Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide)
Concept design: Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide
Project execution: Daniel Zamarbide (project manager), Pierre Musy, Chiara Pezzetta, Flavio Gorgone, Matilde Mozzi
Construction supervision: Daniel Zamarbide, Galliane Zamarbide
Publication drawings: Katerina Gkimizoudi, Rui da Silva
Context: Livable sculpture in BERMUDA, artistic residency and production sites
Location: Sergy, France (FR)
Program: Livable sculpture
Area: 8,8 m²
Status: Completed, 2022
Photography: Dylan Perrenoud
Technical realisation and coordination: Max Bondu (project manager), Léo Schweiger, Simon Rousset, d’Emile Dumas, Julien Griffit, Bénédicte le Pimpec et Anabelle Voisin. A production of the Bermuda workshops.
With the support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia

Posted in projects

Sawerdo

2022-11-17T22:55:00+00:00

°°°
Bakery slow fermentation & Coffee
Interior refurbishment and furniture design
Geneva, Switzerland
October 2021
200 m²
Images by
Dylan Perrenoud

“VIRAL OTHERS” SHARING COFFEE AND BREAD

Two years of covid have pushed everyone to a certain level of distrust. We started the project of the Sawerdo with the fear that putting people around a table was an endangered gathering format. The risk was taken, a sort of hopeful leap of faith by the founders, believing that the jumping microbes of a too-close neighbour would never be an obstacle to being together.Instead, a bet was taken on the opposite scenario: the one by which proximity is a simple vector towards spontaneous conversation and exchange well beyond the fear of a viral other.Our project spatialised and constructed this “moment” of our lives and put everything and everyone around a staged and very material table.Beyond the obvious references to traditional bread-making materials like marble and steel speed racks, the idea became quite simple: a hosting table allowing a variety of configurations. Somehow, the set is a half domestic, half professional one, between sharing “table d’hôtes” and dining in the interior of a bakery.Jeff Wall’s image Dressing Poultry (2007) was shot on a farm near Vancouver, celebrating a moment of fun while working – preparing what will become food. With an aesthetic at the antipodes of Sawerdo’s project, this image has yet the same intention: to bring the act of cooking, nourishing, and sharing into a unifying whole of the living.Like Jeff Wall’s lightboxes, the Sawerdo had the chance to be in a very beautiful space that the project reveals as much as possible: an inhabited lightbox where scenes of life occur and will keep on happening as long as we understand that we are all biological beings or “viral others”.

Daniel Zamarbide, Geneva, Summer 2022

Project by
BUREAU - Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide
+++
Concept design
Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Jolan Haidinger
+++
Project execution
Jolan Haidinger (project manager), Marco Pallaoro, Driss Veyry
+++
Publication drawings
Ignacio Martínez Pendás, Taïma Matthes
+++
Graphic design, branding and sign painting
Basile Jeandin

Posted in projects

Talk / Das Verein / Basel

2022-09-15T15:54:00+01:00

15 september 2022
7 pm
Das Verein - Basel, Switzerland

Transgress - lecture by Galliane Zamarbide and Daniel Zamarbide.Invitation by Das Verein - Basel.

Link: dasverein.org

Posted in news

Talk / MAMCO / Geneva

2022-09-11T16:13:00+01:00

11 September 2022 - 2 pm
MAMCO, Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Genève

Dans le cadre des journées du patrimoine 2022 et de l’exposition des maquettes de Daniel Grataloup, le MAMCO invite BUREAU à prendre la parole, récemment récompensé par le Prix de Genève pour l’expérimentation architecturale.

Link: mamco.ch

Posted in news

Distant Lights

2022-09-08T13:55:00+01:00

°°°
July - October 2022
painting, MDF plinths
Exhibition design
Centro de Artes de Sines
Sines, Portugal
Images by Nuno Cera

Inside the world of the Distant Lights walls and floors converse in landscape mode with extruded plinths and strolling visitors. In a certain way, it is a very general and discrete promenade into the diversity of art formats and supports purposely confusing and blurring the limits of sculpture, painting, photography, frescos, installation art, film and video art. Distant Lights, the rich work of Nuno Cera.

ULTRATHINING

Sines

A strange moment for the town of Sines to host Distant Lights, the rich work of Nuno Cera – a quasi-native of the place and someone who has travelled extensively, eyes wide open around the world. We are living a moment in history where the path of fossil energies has again made a turn … back, as the dramatic Ukrainian war seems to bifurcate towards an already confirmed anthropocentric destruction. How much Sines is reacting positively or negatively to this turn is unknown to us, but Nuno’s Distant Lights might have a broader and more urgent reach than what he initially imagined when starting the creative process of the exhibition, before the Ukrainian war. The title of the show opens the door to a quite complex history of Portugal, one that is built on the expectations of what comes and goes from and into the ocean. A history of global and distant relations, violent at times, is significantly anchored in this little town as it is the birth place of a crucial actor of the conquering fifteenth century.

Sines is Nuno Cera’s familiar landscape, but it would not matter so much if it wasn’t. The printed and filmed preoccupations Nuno has developed over the years converse perfectly with the contrasted lieu that has now exchanged the very physical and heavy wooden ships led by Mr de Gama for submarine cables spitting data at the highest speed.

Museum

Space, like countries and politics, is not neutral. White and architectural neo-minimalism has nothing to do with neutrality.

Once temples of knowledge and culture, museums seem to struggle in abandoning this ancient status to favour their more public vocation. The temple is also the perfect framework to a quite tech-box environment supporting the growing technological and security requirements of the art world.
The thick and often opaque walls of these structures belong to the architectural typology of the monument, protecting art and knowledge within a very enclosed interior rather than producing public dialogue reflected by openness. The case of the Centro de Arte de Sines is no exception; following a certain “Zeitgeist” that makes these spaces exceptional, and exceptionally and beautifully hermetic. The architecture of the Museum is also very concerned with lights, complying to a historical definition of the discipline that presents the “the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light”. Whether this definition is of any interest today is not so relevant here, but the architecture of Aires Mateus in Sines has made a point to identify itself within this cultural-historical identity. Obviously, Nuno Cera inscribes himself into the space, the title implying that he will be dealing with another sort of light, probably, distancing himself or escaping from any preconceived and too determined definition of a specific field.

Ultrathin

The term was coined by Marcel Duchamp to point out perceptive complexity and suggest that art’s role might just be to clarify, clean, polish, or simply reveal certain situations. It also refers to how we move and navigate from two to three to four-dimensional spaces.

The Centro de Artes Sines is a model. A scaled 1:1 model where one enters an Alice in Architecture wonderland, a protected space for daydreaming with light. Ultrathining could be the act of possibly allowing and helping the visitor modify their scale of perception, entering the model and wandering through it. Going down the rabbit hole to find Nuno’s world and defy scalar “gravity”, adjusting perception to the very different situations that the work relates to, zooming in and out continuously, adjusting the lens to what the images have to offer and propose.

The works imagine worlds – walls and floors converse in landscape mode with extruded plinths and strolling visitors. In a certain way, it is a very general and discrete promenade into the diversity of art formats and supports purposely confusing and blurring the limits of sculpture, painting, photography, frescos, installation art, film and video art. It could be that Nuno’s work is all about framing and connecting; bringing forward and sewing together particular situations he encounters. Our work as exhibition designers has been to accompany the work and visitors in the promenade of the bonding frames. Placing, linking, clearing, showing, painting, displacing and revealing discretely the subtle, sometimes random relations – spontaneous encounters between spaces, people, things, images and stories that compose the experience of the exhibition. All of it within the thinnest possible intervention: 0.1 mm.

Daniel ZamarbideSummer 2022Lisboa

Partnership: MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology

Curators: de José Mouro and Julia Albani

Project by BUREAU (Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide)
Concept design by Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta
Construction supervision by Carine Pimenta, Amir Halabi
Publication drawings by Amir Halabi

Posted in projects

ALAMP5421

2022-07-27T17:30:00+01:00

°°°
2021
Images by
Fábio Cunha

The simplest possible tribute to a great design sculptor.

Design
BUREAU (Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide)

Posted in objects

Epfl Alice lab - Resonances 1

2022-06-20T22:48:00+01:00

°°°
A project by Alice (Atelier de la Conception de l’Espace)
EPFL - Switzerland
June 2022
built in Geneva
Images by Dylan Perrenoud
Daniel Zamarbide - Host Professor and Co-Director of ALICE
With Dieter Dietz - Director of ALICE
and Teresa Cheung - year 1 Academic Head

Ressonances is an educational architectural project - a collaboration to build a utopia. The project was born at ALICE, the architecture laboratory of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), and developed over three years in various locations in Europe. Its aim is to redefine the architectural profession, its tools and its involvement with society.

After Lausanne (2016), Zurich (2017), Brussels (2018) and Evian (2019), for the third year running the students will be working in the Greater Geneva area, turning it into a laboratory where they can collectively and globally rethink the relationship between human beings and their natural and built environment. This year, two sites will be involved: the gardens and entrance to the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum in Geneva, and the Avenue des Grandes-Communes in Onex.

Les jardins du MuséeMusée international de la Croix-Rouge et du Croissant-Rouge, Genève (GE)

Le Musée est majoritairement enterré. Pour rendre ses expositions plus visibles, l’institution collabore avec Alice, qui y déploie ses installations à travers ses jardins et espaces d’accueil pour en transformer la perception et en réinventer l’usage. Comme rarement dans l’histoire des projets du Laboratoire ALICE, les étudiant·e·s ont ajouté à leur réflexion un matériau autre que le bois : la terre. Une alternative au béton qui incarne aujourd’hui un symbole de durabilité dans le milieu de l’architecture contemporaine. La construction en terre crue, le pisé, le torchis, d’ancestrales techniques à faible énergie grise qui se révèlent des méthodes de construction intéressante face au réchauffement climatique, rendant les étudiantes et étudiants conscients des besoins et des impacts de leurs choix.

Grands CommunsAvenue des grandes-communes, Onex (GE) À Onex, l’avenue des Grandes-Communes est ponctuée de grands ensembles. C’est un boulevard de la Modernité, construit à l’échelle de la voiture plus qu’à celle de l’humain, situé à la jonction d’un grand bois. Cet été, dans le cadre de la démarche Onex micro-territoire et en étroite concertation avec la commune et le canton, le laboratoire Alice de l’EPFL dessine un trait d’union entre la ville et la forêt, en transformant une section de cette avenue en un espace piétonnier animé.Placées le long de l’axe urbain et s’avançant dans la forêt, les structures légères conçues et construites par les étudiant·e·s de première année offrent de nouveaux espaces et programmes communautaires que les résidents et les visiteurs pourront expérimenter et apprécier. Le jardinage, les spectacles, les activités aquatiques, la cuisine et les repas en commun font partie des diverses propositions qui animeront le quartier. Tout l’été, les structures accueilleront également un panel d’artistes et de musiciens qui égaieront la rue. Grands-Commun expérimente des réponses aux enjeux de réchauffement climatique, au besoin d’espaces publics, aux nouvelles formes de mobilités et sera un phare d’EXPLORE, le festival de la ville de demain à Genève.

Posted in academic

Bureau paper 2

2022-06-03T12:30:00+01:00

°°°
April 2022
NUMERO 2
Newsprint paper, Offset print
1rst edition on April 2022
32 pages - 250 copies

Bureau Paper 2 is the editorial project by BUREAU launch during the Prix de Genève pour l’expérimentation architectural 2022 in Pavillon Sicli.

Contact & purchase, please send an email to bureaupaper@bureau.ac.

Project BUREAU (Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide)
Edition Dylan Perrenoud
Art direction Galliane Zamarbide
Printer Atar Roto Press SA, Geneve, Switzerland
Dans le cadre du Prix de Geneve pour l’expérimentation architecturale

Posted in publications, news

Prix de Genève 22

2022-06-02T16:14:00+01:00

°°°
2 avril 2022
°°°
Lauréat du Prix de Genève
pour l’expérimentation architecturale
°°°
Pavillon Sicli

Récompenser l’expérimentation architecturale sous toutes ses formes.Récompenser l’expérimentation architecturale, sous toutes ses formes, c’est l’ambition du Prix de Genève et ça s’est passé le 5 avril 2022 lors de la cérémonie de remise du prix au Pavillon Sicli.Lauréat sont BUREAU (Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide).Les nominés de cette édition sont les agences Ciguë, Matharoo Associates, MBL Architectes, Alberto Roncelli, Studio Muoto.

Link: prixdegeneve.archi

Si le nom de notre agence, BUREAU, se veut si générique, opaque, c’est pour éviter toute labélisation. Derrière la crainte de devoir répondre à des attentes trop précises, se cache le besoin vital de vivre en continu des expériences renouvelées.Une pratique expérimentale pourrait se définir comme celle fondée sur l’expérience. Si tel est le cas, notre travail peut être dit expérimental, à condition de rester en contact avec le monde terrestre, celui qui embrasse et contient le quotidien et le banal, au même titre que l’inattendu.L’architecture est notre cadre opératif. Nous l’utilisons comme outil à travers lequel des si- tuations et contextes les plus divers peuvent être approchés, transformés, questionnés, éventuellement régénérés. Grâce à ces incroyables sources de recherche et de découvertes que constituent les projets, nous participons un peu à la vie des gens, despas sans conséquences. Nous constatons des difficultés semblables à celles et ceux pour qui le manque d’appartenance à une identité unique et reconnue officiellement reste douloureuse. Cette rugosité du sentier nous aide probablement à avancer. Les visions critiques n’ont pas besoin de se traduire par une pratique désespérée. Au contraire, par l’ensemble de petits pas que nous faisons, notre travail s’est rempli d’optimisme et volonté de continuer à soulever des questions.C’est uniquement à travers des pratiques expérientielles cumulées, en testant des idées et les confrontant à des réalités construites que notre travail se définit peut-être comme expérimental, dans le plus grand laboratoire qui est celui du vécu, de la vie.

Texte de Daniel Zamarbide pour le Prix de Genève pour l’expérimentation architecturale

Posted in news

Talk / FER-Geneva / 2-06-22

2022-06-02T15:20:00+01:00

°°°
2 june 2022
5h30 pm
FER . Geneva

Liaisons temporellesConstruire en respectant l’existantavec Adrien Meuwly et Daniel Zamarbide

Link: batidoc.ch

«Liaisons temporelles»Construire, encore et toujours. Bâtir afin de loger la population. Telle est parfois l’image que se fait la population de la fonction de l’architecte. Mais est-ce vraiment la réalité? La construction de nouveaux bâtiment n’est-elle pas une aberration dans ce monde où les ressources naturelles diminuent et où les espaces verts se font deplus en plus rares? Les architectes Adrien Meuwly et Daniel Zamarbide présenteront leur point de vue sur la relation à l’existant au travers de leurs projets passionnants. Les conférences seront suivies d’un buffet dînatoire.

Posted in news

Lighthouse

2022-01-17T20:15:00+00:00

°°°
Geneva, Switzerland
Images by Pedro Saraiva
With Schnetzer Puskas Engineers

1st prize winner for a competition of a lighthouse in the Leman lake.

Project by
BUREAU - Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide
+++
Structural Engineers
Schnetzer Puskas - Giotto Messi
+++
Concept design
Daniel Zamarbide
+++
Competition Team
Jolan Haidinger (Project lead), Chiara Pezzetta, Ignacio Martínez Pendás, Laëtitia Chauveau, Matilde Mozzi, Inés Acito
+++
Images
Pedro Saraiva

Posted in news, projects

Best Architects 22 - Blue Award

2021-07-20T08:54:00+01:00

Mr Barrett’s House has obtained the BLUE AWARD from Best Architects 22 awards.

Posted in news

Best Architects 22 Awards - Gold Award

2021-07-19T16:27:00+01:00

Dodged House has obtained the GOLD AWARD from Best Architects 22 Awards.

Posted in news

Floating realities

2021-07-06T11:03:00+01:00

°°°
Geneva, Switzerland
October 2020
Float center - Spa renovation
190 m²
Images by
Dylan Perrenoud

A project about floating, mentally and bodily experiencing a certain state of suspension, in a rather safe space, where the outside is imaginary, evoked, lived uniquely through imagery. From a very interiorized experience one is thrown outside, travelling in and out. Obviously, this was not the brief, but a poetic take on it, on how to create a world from which one can rest and imagine, evocative, abstract yet somewhat graspable. When one closes the eyes, the light that has been absorbed, lived transforms into colors, flashes of that connect with undefined sensations. Connecting realities, perceived in the space but also, most of them, outside of it.

The spaces in ORIGIN are about the progression towards that state, through colours, materials, living beings (plants) that accompany the experience of floating naked on a highly salted water pod.The work of Shirana Shahbazi was a direct inspiration. The realness of her photography, but also the multiple possible(s) of the spaces that she proposes. Travels, journeys through sensations, lived realities, precise moments but also unprecise relations, liquid ones, without the need to explain, certainly with the impossibility to explain all of it, no need.What has been proposed is a series of colours that wrap and unfold everything they encounter, opening the book of a space that proposes an insular pause, outside oif everything but in a strong interiority.The progression attempts to fluidly sequence the steps of the user, taking her inside, from a sort of unreal, bi-dimensional image – the show window, or Jeff Wall’s light boxes – to the extreme intimacy of the water pod. Curtains, rails, vertical lines, horizontals surfaces, shelves, long chairs, more lines, tile grid as a guiding measure. All of it contributing to a strong subjectivity of perceptive frames that are altered by other patches of colours, space- holders.Within that rather abstract journey, a series of ridiculous figurative elements perturb a possible purity, or integral coherence. Benches, an “objet-trouvé” from early 20th century urban park tradition. And the strangest reversed immorality emerging down from the ceiling, surrealist touch. Forms, colours, objects, living beings, spaces, all of them playfully smile at each other gathered in an intimate, timidly erotic, and calm trip.

Project by
BUREAU - Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide
+++
Concept design
Daniel Zamarbide and Carine Pimenta
+++
Construction supervision
Carine Pimenta, Jolan Haidinger
+++
Construction drawings and documentation
Marco Pallaoro, Flavio Gorgone, Léo Raphaël, Lois Weber
+++
Publication drawings
Laëtitia Chauveau

Posted in projects

X is not a small country

2021-06-29T21:34:00+01:00

°°°
March - September 2021
metal, plastic
Exhibition design
MAAT - Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology
Lisbon, Portugal
1921m²
Images by Francisco Nogueira

Curators: Aric Chen, Martina MuziGraphic design: Joana Pestana, Max RyanWith projects: Bard Studio (Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty), Bricklab (Abdulrahman Hisham Gazzaz and Turki Hisham Gazzaz), Ibiye Camp, Revital Cohen & Tuur van Balen, He Jing, Liam Young, Paulo Moreira (with Chão - Oficina de Etnografia Urbana and José Sarmento Matos), Rael San Fratello (Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello) and Wolfgang Tillmans

X is Not a Small Country — Unravelling the Post-Global Era Exhibition

The exhibition design follows these lines of thought:Fieldwork: the resurrection of Henrique Galvão’s 1934 map, a complex referential transnational framework.Translation: the very actual and misused topic of borders, peripheries, nations dictating conventions on one side of a line against what might happen on the other.Lines: suggested by a deformed, half invisible grid offering potential narratives of referential diversity, blurring north-south orientations.Geography: an insinuated three-dimensional space grid eludes any clear belonging. Choice: “if I had to choose between The Doors and Dostoyevsky, then – of course – I’d choose Dostoyevsky. But do I have to choose?” (Susan Sontag in Jonathan Cott, The Complete Rolling Stone Interview, Yale University Press, 2013)

The grid has a particular power that extends way beyond its graphical presence. In art, it appeared as an optical device for visual explorations on perspective, particularly intense in the times of Paolo Uccello. In cartography, Cartesian coordinates have occupied extensively the world of maps as a reference system since the 17th century.

The discussion about the validity of the grid as a referential system is thus naturally complex, even more so in an exhibition dealing with post-globalism conditions that has placed its pivotal line of thought on a map (Henrique Galvão’s 1934 Portugal não é um pais pequeno - Portugal is not a small country), opening the door to cartography as a colonization tool. The maps presented specific views of the world with its Cartesian grid, and these views were informed by the martial will of conquering parts the world presented in those same maps.

X IS NOT A SMALL COUNTRY design exhibition modestly addresses this complex and long history, bringing the grid to a three-dimensional level to address the contemporary issues of mapping the world and its transformation in data-based realities. And it confesses a certain degree of convoluted confusion in referencing the world.Once the power game of north-south or east-west classifications has been blurred, as the geopolitical state of the world obviously indicates currently, what grid system could faithfully order or re-order the geolocation of physical and virtual presences?Is the Cartesian coordinates grid still politically acceptable? Was it ever?Indirectly, the endless nature of the grid opens a discussion as well on borders, frontiers, and domination agendas.The particular oval space of the MAAT offers an interesting background to host such hypothesis of post-global presences. For X IS NOT A SMALL COUNTRY a division has been traced for the visitors to somehow confront them with an itinerary choice. The design and art pieces tackle quite openly this sense of dis-belonging following the conventional understanding of national identities. In the exhibition space, they spread “freely” on one sideor the other of a physical and fictional line: a border wall. They appear and disappear in relation to each other, the museum’s architecture, and exhibition design. The variety of media, physical and virtual is also organized to provide indications about the impossibility to classify. It is the choice of the visitor to re-arrange north-south-east-west logics and to recompose them in a contemporary condition, a renewed historical fiction.

*X is Not a Small Country - Unravelling the Post-Global Era*, exhibition view at maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021 © Courtesy of EDP Foundation. Photography by Francisco Nogueira
°°°
Project by BUREAU (Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide)
Concept design by Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Jolan Haidinger
Construction supervision by Carine Pimenta, Jolan Haidinger
Construction drawings and documentation by Chiara Pezzetta, Loïs Weber, Katerina Gkimizoudi
Publication drawings by Ignacio Martínez Pendás

Posted in projects

Epfl Alice lab - Houses Garden 21

2021-06-20T22:22:00+01:00

°°°
A project by Alice (Atelier de la Conception de l’Espace)
EPFL - Switzerland
June 2021
built in Geneva
Images by Thomas Lambert
Daniel Zamarbide - Host Professor and Co-Director of ALICE
With Dieter Dietz - Director of ALICE
and Teresa Cheung - year 1 Academic Head

Houses Gardens 21 is an educational architectural project - a collaboration to build a utopia. The project was born at ALICE, the architecture laboratory of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), and developed over three years in various locations in Europe. Its aim is to redefine the architectural profession, its tools and its involvement with society.

Throughout the summer of 2021, four sites in the canton of Geneva will be home to buildings built by first-year architecture students at the EPFL: Genthod, Aigues-Vertes, Vernier and Onex. Installed on four sites in Geneva and prefabricated at La Rasude in Lausanne, the wooden Houses/Gardens each tell a story, while forming an urban stroll between them, to be undertaken by bike or on foot. With these installations, ALICE continues its architectural exploration of Lake Geneva on the theme of gardens, begun in 2019 with a rediscovery of the shores of Evian-les-Bains. By following the axis of the Rhône, the Geneva region has established itself as a new field of experimentation.

Posted in academic

Bada Bing! / Sympusium / 11-06-21

2021-06-11T16:09:00+01:00

°°°
11 June 2021
Online and on-site
MUDAC, Musée de design et d’arts appliqués contemporains
Lausanne, Switzerland

Sympusium Rigolarium: on peut rire de tout, mais pas avec n’importe qui. Curated by Alexandra Midal, MUDAC (Musée de design et d’arts appliqués contemporains) , Lausanne, Switzerland.

Posted in news

ARCHIPELAGO / conversation / Head / Geneva

2021-05-07T18:00:00+01:00

°°°
Archipelago: Architectures for the Multiverse
7 May 2021
Conversation
HEAD - Geneva (Haute École d’Art et Design), Switzerland

Conversation: Territories of Intervention (2:30–3:50pm CEST)Introduction by MOUNIR AYOUB and VANESSA LACAILLE (Laboratoire d’architecture)DANIEL ZAMARBIDE, CHARLOTTE TRUWANT, JUSTINIEN TRIBILLONModerated by MERIEM CHABANI

Image by HEAD Geneva

Organized by two schools of the HES⁠-⁠SO University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland (Geneva)—HEAD, Geneva School of Art and Design and HEPIA, Geneva School of Engineering, Architecture and Landscape—Archipelago: Architectures for the Multiverse is the first edition of a digitally-anchored international event arising from a partnership between three departments—architecture, interior architecture and landscape architecture—that will be broadcast from May 6 to 8 in Geneva.

Posted in news, academic

Open House / Roundtable / Geneva

2021-05-06T17:24:00+01:00

°°°
Open House Geneva 2021
conversation

Conversation with David Malaud for OPEN HOUSE, Geneva, Switzerland, initiated by Simon Lamunière.

OPEN HOUSE is a multidisciplinary exhibition which presents innovative and original forms of housing through projects from the world of art, architecture and design. OPEN HOUSE is an event initiated by Simon Lamunière.

Posted in news, academic

MAAT / Roundtable / 23-04-21

2021-04-22T10:53:00+01:00

°°°
23 april 2021
5h30 pm - 8h00 pm
Online and on-site
MAAT, Museum of Art, Architecture ans Technologie
Lisbon

The Designers Roundtable: Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli (2050+), Claude Marzotto and Maia Sambonet (Óbelo Studio), Daniel Zamarbide (BUREAU) and Joana Pestana & Max Ryan, moderated by the critic and curator Julia Albani.

OPEN/CLOSED SYSTEMS2021 Spring Opening at maat

Join us live at the museum for a full afternoon of events to celebrate the new season with on site and online sessions featuring presentations with the protagonists of the three shows that opened on April 5th.

The two-part event is held live at maat and streamed on the museum Youtube channel and Facebook – book your ticket or watch online to enjoy roundtable conversations, digital and sound performances, live data-sonification dj-sets among others.

Link to the event page

Posted in news

ARCHITEKTOUR / conversation / baunetz ID / Berlin

2021-04-20T18:26:00+01:00

°°°
20 April 2021
baunetz interior design
Conversation
Berlin, Germany

Die Heinze ArchitekTOUR startete am 19. April und läuft noch bis 14. Mai. Im Rahmen des Events treffen sich namhafte Größen, Newcomer und Industrieexperten im virtuellen Raum, um über Perspektiven für das Bauen von morgen zu sprechen.By Baunetz Interior Design.

Um 13 Uhr folgen schließlich Vorträge von Daniel Zamarbide, Gründer des Architekturstudios Bureau, und dem kanadischen Architekten Jean Verville, der eine aufgeschlossene Herangehensweise, mehr Verspieltheit und Raum für Kunst einfordert.

Posted in news

Archizoom / Lecture / 9-03-21

2021-02-23T09:41:00+00:00

°°°
9 March 2021
18h30 - 20h00
Online
ARCHIZOOM - EPFL

DANIEL ZAMARBIDE (BUREAU) + ADRIEN VERSCHUERE (BAUKUNST)moderation: Vanessa Pointet (Assistant, EAST-EPFL)

Link: memento.epfl.ch

Lecture series engaging the guest professors at the EPFL School of Architecture — two 20 minute presentations by two guest professors followed by a 20 minute moderated discussion.

A unique opportunity to learn more about the current work and research of our visiting professors.

Posted in news, academic

Maria

2021-02-19T06:46:00+00:00

°°°
Lisboa, Portugal
July 2020
Apartment renovation
88 m²
Images by
Francisco Nogueira

MARIA is just an apartment, a place for an occupant that can potentially always sleep in a couch, live with a dog, cook on the balcony, eat on the floor, read in the bathroom, stand on the kitchen counter, and decide that she does not need to catalogue her multiple, rich and diverse everyday gestures and usage rituals tocreate an avatar of herself. MARIA is a disconnected physical space waiting to be inhabited in the richest way possible, without prejudices and directed ways of inhabitation. As a space, MARIA has an undefined sexual identity.

MARIA.Memojical typologies.

The architectural classification that is applied to how an apartment plan is distributed, how its parts are arranged is frequently referred as housing typology: it defines and catalogues common characteristics or types. It is a quite well know concept in architecture, and particularly in spaces dedicated to inhabitation: apartments, houses. Typologies are usually reflected in plan models, with iterations of room distribution patterns. Inevitably, in order to apply a certain type of plan to a given situation or context, one needs to decide (inrare cases) or inherit (in most cases) to which kind of living it corresponds to. At this point the exercise becomes quite thorny. Norms and regulations dictate how we navigate into housing typologies and they are fabricated using certain notions of what a household might be and how it should behave in its intimate space. Cultural habits bring in conventions regarding how a family is supposed to look like, and how it is assumed that it will occupy the house spaces.Thus, the catalogue of possibilities is drastically reduced since, unsurprisingly, the household traditional kit of parts comprehends a heterosexual husband, wife and one or two kids with intimacy spaces ranging from the more “public” as the dining room to the more private as the parents’ room bathroom.The greatest percentage of apartments and houses around us belong to this hard -to-question model.

In 2018 Apple came up with the memojis, a bit behind his Asian competitors but in a sexier look. Memojis create avatar of ourselves by tracking our facial movements. The idea is that this avatar will learn progressively how to create a catalogue of emotional gestures that would specifically define our digital self.The perversion comes, as Shoshana Zuboff has exposed in her extensive research on Surveillance Capitalism, from a continuously reversed movement: providing our avatar with a series of classifiable emotional facialgestures, we somehow subjugate these gestures to the technological limitations of the app. This going back and forth between our face and the phone screen blurs our power of command to a point where we will probably never really know if we have informed the avatar about our facial emotional possibilities or if itstechnological capacities have conditioned our smiles.

I guess that the same applies to the typological conditioning of our spaces. We will never know who is at command. But we do know, as architects, designers, that these conditions do not consider diversity. We are forced to work as if every space was addressed to one single category of non-gendered, monolithic households. Who is thus designing our living spaces? What are the unsaid values imposed to housing typologies? Is there a space, in our houses, for companion-species? Does an apartment for a single personrespond to the same space organization than one for a family of four? Does it allow appropriation? Flexibility in use? Are the needs of a contemporary family the same as in the past?

MARIA is just an apartment, a place for an occupant that can potentially always sleep in a couch, live with a dog, cook on the balcony, eat on the floor, read in the bathroom, stand on the kitchen counter, and decide that she does not need to catalogue her multiple, rich and diverse everyday gestures and usage rituals to create an avatar of herself. MARIA is a disconnected physical space waiting to be inhabited in the richest way possible, without prejudices and directed ways of inhabitation. As a space, MARIA has an undefined sexualidentity.

Project by
BUREAU - Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide
+++
Concept design
Daniel Zamarbide
Carine Pimenta
João Paixão
Francisco Castelo Blanco
+++
Construction drawings and documentation
Carine Pimenta
Jolan Haidinger
Tobias Von Der Mühll
+++
Construction supervision
Carine Pimenta
Jolan Haidinger
+++
Publication drawings
Driss Veyry
+++
Models
Marta Goncalves
Nicolai Sarbib
Louís

Posted in projects

Mush Rooms

2021-01-05T13:22:00+00:00

°°°
July - December 2020
metal, plastic sheets, led stripes, marble, mushrooms
Set design - Cooking performance
MAAT - Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology
Lisbon, Portugal
For 5th Istanbul Biennial - IKSV Design Biennial
20m²
Images by Francisco Craveiro Santos - BY

To be contemporary might just mean to re-learn how to dwell in instability, in uncertainty. Now that the notion of progress (or capitalist modernism) seems to be quite fragile and finally questionable, whatever was a solid given or truth is in its way to evaporation.

Mush Rooms video is available here on e-flux

Interview with Mariana Pestana & Daniel Zamarbide at MAAT

The viral crisis that the world population is going through at this very moment confirms the volatility of a stable world as we have understood up to this day. The same crisis has called for, or reminded us the importance of a political attitude towards newly perceived paradigms. As much as they are not so recent, they seem to retain our attention at a global scale only these days, when the expression or visibility of the problem appears to be so important and clear that anyone denying it has very quickly gained a status close to idiocy (no need to name the few important figures of this group).A political position is thus unavoidable. Politics need to enter, through new tools and new understandings many aspect of our everyday life.

Our attempt with this project for the Istanbul Biennial is a small contribution to that positioning through a design piece, an aesthetic vocabulary that has the ambition to integrate the critical thinking of intellectuals, scientists and artists that are and have been working on environmental and bio-political topics of the Anthropocene.Our world is indirectly inspired by Donna Haraway’s String Figures (and other SF’s) and Bruno Latour’s Gaia world (after Lovelock and Margulis) but will constitute a design piece on its own, with its own internal logic and character.

The work is a filmed performance of a meal preparation, responding, freely, to the format of the cooking show. It is a cooking performance by chef Walter El Nagar in front of a small public. Accompanied by a live musical experimentation by Filipe Felizardo, chef Walter performed cooking to work in and around decomposition and fermentation. The main ingredients and general framework for the performance directly derive from Anna Tsing’s Mushrooms at The End of the World.

During 30 minutes, Filipe developed his series “A Conference of Stones” in the company of a mineral public. As he has stated himself, he made an attempt to “become a smell” through his soundscapes.A large cooking table was the stage of the performance, specifically designed to constitute a landscape of living and inert Materia of all kinds. The performance culminated in a real meal where parts of the landscape were able to be eaten. The film will navigate between landscape contemplative images and the cooking and music performative act.The table, and thus the landscape oscillate between living, growing, decomposition and composition and our relation, as human spectators, to this otherness that we observe, contemplate and integrate into our body as a symbiotic act. Walter uses fermentation and mushrooms as essential ingredients of his chemistry. The idea that the matsutake mushrooms grow out of humanely destroyed or abandoned environments is central to the cooking.

In terms of architecture and design, the performance addresses indirectly the notion of reproduction and scale: how we work with models and miniatures to “represent” imagined worlds, how solid these representations are and how they can be part of our living experience as much as static representations of something to become. Somehow the installation can be also considered as a living 1:1 model.

The performance took place at MAAT, as a public event (with restricted number of people respecting sanitary restrictions). The public remained silent during the performance, after which a more informal moment took place.The film will be edited after the material produced during the performance.

MUSH ROOMS is an attempt to acknowledge that we are multi-specifically connected, that what our body is less solid than we think, that the air that we breath is less unsubstantial than what we believe. And that we really exist by dwelling within these multiple states.

Project by BUREAU - Daniel Zamarbide
Film direction by BUREAU (Galliane Zamarbide & Daniel Zamarbide)
Development and coordination by BUREAU (Jolan Haidinger)
Cooking by Chef Walter El Nagar with Kevin Peter
Live music by Filipe Felizardo
Set design production - MAAT (Francisco Soares)
Film production, editing and images - By (bycom.pt)
Cameras - Alexandre Cortez
Editing - Tiago Duarte
Co-production MAAT - Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology & IKSV Design Biennial
MAAT directed by Beatrice Leanza

Posted in projects

Mies Van Der Rohe Award - NOMINEE

2021-01-04T12:24:00+00:00

Dodged House was nominated to the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture Mies Van Der Rohe Award 2022.

Link: bureau.ac

Posted in news

7000 Oaks

2020-11-03T15:58:00+00:00

°°°
Landscape, public space
Geneva, Switzerland
June 2020
14’225 m²
Images by two photographers
Dylan Perrenoud and Guillaume Collignon

A family of oaks has settled in the heart of Geneva. Family name : Quercus. These are their firsts: five robur, ten cerris, sixty petraea fify-six pubescens and four frainetto. A total of one hundred and thirty four discreet living beings that will grow durably in the company of Geneva’s other populations.

The photographic report presented here is the result of the juxtaposition of the work of two different photographers, consisting of their personal interpretation of the project through their multiple visits on site.Dylan Perrenoud – digital camera and Guillaume Collignon –analog photography, medium format.

135 oak trees employed: Quercus Acutissima, Quercus Castaneifolia, Quercus Cerris, Quercus Frainetto, Quercus Petraea, Quercus Pubescens, Quercus Robur

7’239 perennial plants and shrubs employed: Abelia grandiflora, Amelanchier rotundifolia, Aquilegia vulgaris, Artemisia arb.‘Powis Castle‘, Berberis vulgaris, Campanula latifolia, Campanula rapunculoides, Carex foliosissima, Carex ornithopoda, Choysya ternata, Colutea arborescens, Cornus mas, Cornus sanguinea, Corylopsis pauciflora, Cowdalis lutea, Daphne laureola, Dryopteris filix-mas, Erigeron karwinskianus, Euphorbia characias ssp. wulfenii, Fragaria vesca, Geranium cantabrigiense, Geranium macrorrhizum, Geranium sanguineum, Hamamelis mollis, Hedera colchica ‘Arborescens’, Heuchera sanguinea, Hydrangea quercifolia, Ilex crenata, Ligustrum ovalifolium, Ligustrum vulgare ‘Atrovirens‘, Lonicera nitida, Lonicera pileata, Luzula nivea, Malva moschata, Origanum vulgare, Osmanthus heterophyilus ‘Gulftide‘, Osmanthus x burkwoodii, Phlomis russeliana (samia), Polystichum aculeatum, Polystichum setiferum, Rhamnus catharcticus, Ribes alpinum, Staphylea pinnata, Stipa gigantea, Viburnum lantana, Waldsteinia ternata

Joseph Beuys’ 7000 oaks for the 1982 Documenta in Kassel constituted a turn in the art world. By a quite simple conceptual gesture the artist managed to use the power of art discourse and action to activate an environmental concern that has grown ever since. This happened in 1980s, the same decade which saw a very substantial acceleration of violence towards all living beings on earth. Ever since, we have been trying to develop our consciousness to counter this movement, with a relatively poor success. One the most interesting issues about his art gesture is that it constituted a real contract with the city of Kassel. It was through the engagement of a contractual relation that the piece acquired all its strength. Its subtitle was important as well: City forestation instead of City administration. The discussions, polemics, and difficulties to find the funds for this enormous project had the consequence of it being treated exactly as a moment or point of a political agenda. This is probably the most powerful argument of the proposal. From his artist position and posture, Beuys anticipated what was going to become a political and civic issue: the presence of the vegetal and animal (other-than-human-living-beings) world in urban fabrics as a breathing, vital necessity. There is another perspective on this: co-existence. We depend on other living beings to transform the atmospheric air into breathable oxygen. We can also think of these beautiful transforming organic machines as companions, creatures that live with us.The discreet, sometimes majestic, dynamic presence of plants is part of our lives and our lives are symmetrically part of theirs. French botanist Francis Halle has talked extensively about the discretion of trees, how their rather important presence does not involve any sort of arrogance over other smaller and less powerful beings. Trees are peaceful companions.

Cities renew, evolve through dynamism and urban mutation; they grow as a more complex nature than one just made out of inert materials and mechanical fluids. All of it is part of an intertwined ensembles of “things” and beings that interact and make the urban fabric a tense, contrasted and exciting tissue where most of us enjoy being in a composite togetherness. The project of the CEVA station in Geneva extends, or installs itself within this idea of multifaceted relationships. The new infrastructure, thought and designed by Jean Nouvel and Eric Maria as a piece of a network of stations redefining the Geneva region accessibilities, relates to our intervention, in a companionship connection. Trains pass by, in the underground, and people go up and down, traversing the vertical layers of the infrastructural soil, to discover a growing condition, composed of 138 oak trees and hundreds of other planted companions.

The simple idea of “just” planting trees, accompanies the arrivals and departures of the new regional train line. Flows from the underground transform, adapt their pace into slower meandering routes, proposing a sort of “flaneur” experience, under and with the trees and their intense planted ground. These micro eco-systems are hosted in dedicated islands, not necessarily accessible to humans. They have enough space elsewhere. They can sit, enjoy their pauses and chats on the borders of these islands and on dedicated urban furniture. With time, patience and experience, the place will become a specific and beautiful eco-system, where people, trees, microbes, insects, other plants will co-exist peacefully. Some of us will still be in a hurry and dig down the escalators to take the next train, some others will breathe slowly observing from above the red lights of the train lines for decades, growing, discussing, and looking at the world resiliently.

Project by Daniel Zamarbide with Leopold Banchini
Realization by BUREAU | Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide
Lead architects | Jolan Haidinger, Joana Croft, Vanessa Pointet 
Design Team | Anna Scorretti, Lilian Pala, Luísa Pires, Mélanie Ganino, Pauline Tondreau, Peter Bauer, Andreina Mosquera, Thibault Pierron

Posted in projects

Undoing Architecture / Kunstmuseum Basel / Symposium / 01-10-20

2020-10-08T16:53:00+01:00

°°°
2020
Symposium with Archithese
Kunstmuseum Basel
Basel, Switzerland

With Archithese

With the lecturers :

Torsten Lange
Remo Reginold
Li Tavor
Daniel Zamarbide

Posted in news

Swiss Architects / Zürich / Talk / 10-09-20

2020-09-10T11:08:00+01:00

°°°
2020
Mr Barrett’s House
with Swiss Architects
18h00
Landesmuseum
Zurich, Switzerland

About Mr Barrett’s House, Geneva

Link: swiss-architects.com

Posted in news