Finding Buildings

Burkhalter Sumi Architects were founded in Zurich in 1984. Their list of realised projects for public and private clients includes a wide range of tasks: workspaces, hotels and housing structures, urban development master-plannings and conversions of disused industrial buildings. The office has gained particular recognition for their state-of-the-art timber constructions. The first stage of the architect's design process is drawing by hand. It is a truly creative process driven by thinking in variations. Marianne Burkhalter's chalk-drawings are fine examples for research that is carried-out simultaneously at various levels of differing importance: approaching the task, exploring potentials of a program as well as its problems and searching for forms, layouts and shapes. Other than the technical drawing, the chalk-drawing is ambiguous, even paradoxical, concise and blurred, determined and undecided all at the same time. This exploration of the field of tension of 'sense and sensibility' becomes fascinatingly traceable in Marianne Burkhalter's drawings. "Burkhalter Sumi Architects. Finding Buildings" presents drawings for twenty projects, built and unrealised, from the past ten years. This title includes a text in English and German.