Swiss Miss

Switzerland has a well-deserved reputation for pioneering green building design, so it was with not without anticipation that Footprint headed to the recent exhibition at the RIBA with the promising title: Swiss positions: 33 takes on sustainable approaches to building.

Swiss Positions explores a variety of topics with regard to engineering techniques, materials, ecology and protection of the environment. The only common thread linking the projects – whether viewed from a technological, organic, social, vernacular or bioclimatic angle – is that they interact with the often spectacular landscapes in which they are set. The travelling exhibition turned out to be a series of boards with photographs and short texts describing Switzerland’s ‘most sustainable’ architectural projects of the past 20 years. This type of display is in danger of giving sustainability a bad name.

Footprint attended a talk in conjunction with the exhibition by Christian Müller of Christian Müller Architects (CMA), a Swiss and Rotterdam-based practice. Like the exhibition, Müller’s talk drew on a wide spectrum of definitions of sustainability: through a series of projects, he presented economic, urban and social aspects of the topic. ‘Sustainability is so implicit in the design process that I don’t even mention it to clients’, explains Müller. He sees the role of architects as comparable to that of the Renault brothers: a combination of intelligence and craftsmanship which is a platform for sharing manpower, knowledge and collaboration.

Müller presented Villa Vals - a spectacular underground holiday home designed with Amsterdam practice SeARCH, completed in 2009. Villa Vals, now available for holiday rentals, immediately gained notoriety because of its proximity to Zumthor’s Therme Vals. Sustainability was not a major driver for the design, but rather emerged through the construction process. Many materials were locally sourced. When asked whether Villa Vals could be replicated in different contexts, Müller replied, ‘you could always build a hill first!’

Müller also presented Utrecht City Hall - a civic centre project designed in collaboration with Kraaijvanger Urbis and completed in 2011 - to exemplify the practice’s sustainable approach to urban design and forward-thinking planning. The administrative building is more comparable in size to an ‘oil rig than a building’. CMA redefined the brief to free 2000m² of additional public realm by moving the proposed site above an existing train station. ‘You can’t get more sustainable than that’, Müller commented, hinting at the recent overuse and dilution of the term ‘sustainability’.

Economic sustainability was a strong thread that ran throughout the talk. Müller stressed that sustainable buildings need not cost more than a resource intensive project. He believes ‘sustainability is an approach you can sell because it impacts everybody’s wallet. It is not a green hobby or NGO project but a selling point because it saves money’. According to Müller, sustainability is about the bottom line, rather than saving the planet: ‘there’s no point in pushing solar panels if no one is buying them. The moralistic aspect is limited’.

Following the talk, the audience was invited downstairs to peruse the exhibition boards and discuss their own take on Swiss Positions.

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