BIENNIAL PROJECT
Portraits I–VI
Made in suggest that the entirety of architectural—images, documentation, or cities—constitute a repository, a shared resource that can be constantly churned and recombined ad infinitum without loyalty to facts or sources. Their installation, an enormous salon wall that is buckling forward under its own weight, is lined with images produced in their classes at ETH Zurich and Accademia di Architettura Mendriso between 2011–2015. Portraits is a series of projects that critically assess the mutually enlightening effects of merging different building types. These projects, displayed in montage and intricate drawings, in some cases test contemporary programmatic typologies with historical building forms; for instance we see an airbus taking off from a runway through a 17th century French Castle estate. In other cases one can see formal resonances produced out of the unlikely meeting of a cruise ship and its contemporary global passengers with submerged industrial concrete monoliths. The smoothness of these images, that blend references in ways that are difficult to pinpoint, asks for a rethinking of contemporary received ideas and cultural references.
BIO
François Charbonnet and Patrick Heiz are co-founders of the architecture studio Made In, based in Geneva, Switzerland. After graduating from the ETH Zurich, they collaborated with Herzog & de Meuron and OMA before setting up their own office in 2003. In addition to their practice, they are frequent lecturers and have been visiting professors at the EPF Lausanne (2010-2011), the ETH Zurich (2011-2013), and the Accademia di Archittetura, Mendrisio (2014-2015).
