Kruh // Architektky: Isa Stürm (CH) + Nathalie Rossetti (CH)

Isa Stürm: All the various kisses of architecture (Los Super Elegantes II)

Stürm & Wolf invent buildings and spaces for magnificent cities on a gorgeous planet! Their architecture built in stone, steel, glass and wood seduce from detail to space. Elegant in manners and triggering creative use their projects encounter playfully with everyday life.

Emphasizing the sculptural and lyric character of architecture Stürm & Wolf bring manifold realities into site. Their architecture loves the arts. Human senses are central in their habitats stimulating thoughts and ideas for tomorrow. In this lecture Isa Stürm presents recently finished projects as well as some selected key-architectures.

Isa Stürm was born in Paris and lives in Zürich. She completed her studies of architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich, where she worked for Adolf Max Vogt, chair of Architectural Theory and History. Before establishing her own architectural practice with Urs Wolf in 1988, she was collaborating with Santiago Calatrava, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron.

The firm’s working practice includes projects for housing, museums, cultural institutions, industry, offices, urban planning as well as landscaping projects. Research, experiment and collaboration with practitioners in other fields are important means of their professional discourse.

The early projects include the Plarenga depot in the Grisons and the SVA office building and the Röntgenareal housing estate, both in Zürich. For the national exhibition Expo.02, the architects developed the pavilion ‘Who am I?’ for the Swiss Federation. They have also designed and executed exhibitions, shows and performance projects for Swiss Design Awards, Swiss Art Awards and Akris as well as interiors for the fashion designers Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, Albert Kriemler and global fashion labels in Zürich and New York. In recent years they have worked on three significant projects: the automobile museum in Appenzell, the cultural centre in Gstaad and the housing cooperative Waidmatt in Zürich. They built the art museum Kunst(Zeug)Haus in Rapperswil-Jona and the cultural centre Lokremise in St.Gall. Recently the high-end fashion department store Weinberg in the heart of Zürich as well as the combined office and residential townhouse Neugasse in the creative downtown epicenter were inaugurated.

Theoretical discourse is another of Isa Stürm’s main interests. She regularly sits on juries, acts as a visiting critic, writes texts and gives talks and lectures at worldwide schools and institutions. She also sits on the board of cultural and art institutions. She acted as an architectural consultant for the Federal Commission of Fine Arts and currently is a member of the Architecture Biennials Jury of Switzerland. She was teaching as visiting professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne. With the students she proposed contemporary habitats for Venice the reanimation of European city in mind.

Nathalie Rossetti: Rossetti+Wyss

Rossetti+Wyss searches in the work process the explicit and unique attitude respecting the fundamental needs of the environment, the technical possibilities of the present and the informal and formal needs of the project itself.

The conscious and ongoing reduction of the means lead to recognizable results. The continuous reduction of applied elements and the immediate connection of materials support the self-evident and unconstrained appearance of the buildings.

The work of Rossetti+Wyss is accompanied with an ease and an immediacy in order to substrate the relevant sensual information about the built space. During the lecture Nathalie Rossetti will present works of Rossetti+Wyss and talks about the relevant aspects.

Nathalie Rossetti was born 1970 in Napoli. She studied at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich and gained her Diploma in 1995 at Prof. Flora Ruchat. She collaborated with the studios of René Stoos, Brugg, studio of Prof. H. E. Kramel at  ETH in Zurich, with the office of Bétrix & Consolascio architects in Erlenbach, and with the studio of Sandra Giraudi at the University USI in Mendrisio. She was a co-project leader for the gym in Zug in Switzerland. She co-founded Rossetti + Wyss architects in January 2000.

She has been a member of juries in national and international architecture competitions and the board of directors of the Swiss engineer and architect association SIA. Since 2010 she has been a member of the confederation of Swiss architects (BSA).