Lecture date: 2000-10-25
Since Jacques Herzog began his partnership with Pierre de Meuron in 1978, their practice has become one of the leading architectural design partnerships in Europe. Their Eberswalde Library, designed in collaboration with the artist Thomas Ruff, took the idea of a pictorial facade further than any previous Herzog & de Meuron project and was the subject of an AA Publication. Combining elements which have long been deemed incompatible – minimalism and ornament, purity and baroque fullness, concrete box and pictorial facade, space and surface – the building challenges the conventions of modernism. For this event, Jacques Herzog presents a series of images of the Eberswalde Library in Eberswalde, Germany.
Herzog also shows a competition project for a Greek Orthodox Church which reconfigured the traditional composition of icons within the space of the Church; and the packing and distribution centre for Ricola Europe near the Swiss border in France that includes translucent wall panels printed with a repeated motif of a photograph of a leaf by Karl Blossfeldt.
Herzog’s presentation is followed by brief responses from Mark Cousins and Andrew Benjamin.
Mohsen Mostafavi then moderates a conversation between the participants.
