Learning through questioning

CR: In the Swiss context, there is a clear tendency for young architects to pursue an independent path. Many colleagues have started their own practices, either after gaining experience in larger offices or directly after university, while others have begun their careers working as assistants at universities.

MD: That seems to be the trend. Many people combine university work with starting a small practice. But the way you build your office in this situation is different because the economic pressures are not the same. You might have more room to experiment, but at the same time fewer concrete projects. It’s simply a different way of developing a practice.

CR: There are still a few like us who started after about two years working in another office. For us, it was clear from the start that we wanted to work on our own projects, with our own ideals and ethics. Even during our studies, we were sure this was the path we wanted to follow as quickly as possible.

We both grew up in Valais, but we didn’t know each other. We started university separately, in Lausanne. We did the first two years of our bachelor’s at the EPFL, and then we went on separate Erasmus exchanges—me to Berlin, Marc to Gothenburg, Sweden. I think that really opened up a lot of perspectives for both of us. After that, we ended up doing internships in Paris, and that’s when we realised we were both there. We caught up and had a “friend crush”. 

MD: Spending those two years in Paris was intense—both professionally and personally. It was a wild time, but it was our goal to learn as much as we could from the city, the people, and the architectural field. The scene in Paris is small, so everyone knows each other. We felt like we were part of something. Charlotte was doing her internship at NP2F, and I was at BRUTHER. By then, we had already had several conversations about collaborating and had discussed the idea of working together, even though we had never actually done so before.

CR: After Paris, we both went to the ETH in Zurich. Changing universities was really valuable. Through the Erasmus programme and our internships, we saw how much you can learn just by changing context. 

MD: You start to see things from different angles. That’s why we chose ETH. During my master’s, I worked on Sur le Rocher, a small private commission that showed us it was actually possible to make our ideas happen. It was back in 2019, and we were still pursuing our master’s. We realised we had the opportunity to start our own projects. That project opened up new opportunities and marked a real turning point for DER.

CR: In the meantime, we were also entering some small competitions and side projects, while working in other offices as well. In Zurich, I worked at Schmid Schaerer Architekten. They focus on public projects like schools, elder care facilities, and housing. Overall, it was a great chance—I learned a lot, and it gave me solid experience in construction and working on bigger projects. 

MD: I worked at Comte Mewly in Zurich on a school project in Renens, near Lausanne. Following a large project with little prior experience was a real challenge. Experiences like that give you the fundamentals and the tools you need to navigate the industry.

CR: While working in Zurich, lablab reached out with a proposition to share a space in Martigny.  It was one of those moments where everything aligns—the right people, the right space. You don’t know if it’s the right time, but you either take the opportunity or keep working in offices for another 10 years. It was a crossroads. That’s how everything started. 

Valais under review

CR: The challenges in Martigny are quite different from those in Zurich. In the big cities—Zurich, Geneva, Lausanne—the main concern is densification. Here, instead, we deal with the complexities of a very different kind of territory. The land is divided into small plots, mostly single-family houses, which is the typical housing model. For us, the biggest shift that’s coming is that people won’t be able to afford those single-family homes any more. That’s the main question in this area right now: How do you densify? Do we still accept building single-family houses? There’s still some land left to develop, but not much. It’s a really challenging question—what do you do with all those single-family houses? How do you work with a territory that’s already so built up? How do you create new urban synergies?

MD: As Charlotte mentioned, if you want to build a single-family house now, even in Valais, you have to be a certain kind of person. So, as architects, if we just continue building that model, we limit ourselves to serving a very specific type of client, and that’s not the architecture we want to practice. Economic constraints are always a big issue, but for us, it’s about how we work with clients through the process, involving them in the construction. This approach makes the project more affordable, but it also disrupts the traditional roles between client, architect, and contractors. You have to reinvent the process, and it’s a challenge to find the right balance. Sometimes clients become too involved, and it’s hard to navigate that. But as architects, you have to accept that, even if it’s tough. We learn all about control in school, but in practice, it’s different.

CR: You have to accept that the client might want to do something themselves—like build a detail you designed—and it won’t turn out exactly how you imagined. You have to react more organically to the process. 

MD: With this family house, for example, we’ve learned that not everything can be solved through construction alone. If the foundation of a project isn’t meaningful to you, it’s hard to carry it through to the end. This is the only new house we’re working on at the moment, and we’re questioning each step. But it’s not the architecture itself we’re questioning—it’s the context, which is what truly defines the project.

CR: For us, architecture isn’t just about the final product. It’s about the process and the story we build along the way. The final object is important, but it’s not the goal—it’s the way we practice.

MD: In the Valais region, a lot of the challenges come from the social context of the buildings. For instance, many people have second homes in the region, and in my village, half the dwellings are second homes. At the same time, there’s a housing crisis because people want to live in the mountains, especially due to climate change and the post-COVID shift in lifestyle. People are looking for a better quality of life, and they want to move to the mountains. But the territory is limited, and there’s no more space for construction. Meanwhile, many second homes are unoccupied. 

CR: It’s a tough situation, and we, as architects, are trying to contribute to it. Most of our projects are either renovations or restorations of old houses that were vacant or second homes, and we transform them into daily living spaces.

MD: That said, you need some political push to make second homes more expensive and to allow people to live in the existing spaces. It’s always about money, but it’s a necessary change to make the most of what already exists.

Opportunity in constraint

CR: These pressing questions are central to one of our ongoing projects, located in Sembrancher. It’s a five-story village house—nothing extraordinary on its own, but it sits within a protected historical context, known in Switzerland as ISOS.

The building is composed of five levels: a basement, a ground floor with potential commercial space, two levels of living space, and a third level that could also be inhabited. Being a protected building, the facade cannot be altered. One of our key questions was which spaces to renovate and which to leave as they are—after all, you probably don’t need to inhabit the entire building, and you likely don’t have the financial means to do so. How can we create a project that remains cohesive while allowing the clients to make reasonable investments?

MD: That was also the client’s direction. They talked about restoration rather than renovation, and that’s something we carried through the process. We found it really powerful. It allowed us to question the outcome of the project and the Swiss obsession with control and “cleanness”. 

CR: What we also tried to do was define a new notion of comfort based on the rooms. Which rooms would we insulate and which wouldn’t? We needed to be careful about what we heated and what we didn’t, because the volume is 1,000 cubic meters.

MD: The client accepted from the start that some rooms, like the bathroom, might be very warm, while others, such as the peripheral rooms, would be less insulated and cooler. It’s a rethinking of comfort. This approach could be applied to other projects, but it requires a client willing to go along with it. For us, it’s interesting because many larger or more established architecture firms avoid projects under one million, and this brings new opportunities for smaller practices like ours. That economic constraint is actually an advantage—it forces us to explore new or alternative solutions, which often become key aspects of the project. We have clients who come to us with limited budgets, and for us, that’s exciting. It brings fresh solutions to the table and challenges us to find ways to make it work.

Anchored in place

MD: The Valais context is quite specific. The region still favours open calls for public projects, unlike many other cantons where participation is more restricted and often requires extensive references, making it harder for new architects to get involved. While practices from across Switzerland and Europe apply, it’s often the local offices that win, thanks to their deeper understanding of the context.

CR: Understanding the territory is crucial. We experienced it in a competition we did for a mountain cabin in Arolla. It’s a specific context, very rocky and high up. Our proposal, titled OBJECTIF LUNE, involved the reuse of an existing cabin, which we fully restored, and then built around it. 

MD: For example, one of the main approaches here was how to touch the ground, and more generally, how to engage with the context. We often ask ourselves how we can approach the site with a certain level of sensitivity—what is the impact we want to make? I would say that our approach is less about bold gestures and more about being humble in the way we interact with the site. That sometimes doesn’t work well in competitions because juries may not have a lot of time to make a decision, and a strong move can be more immediately understandable. 

For the structure, we proposed something adaptable because the ground here is shifting due to climate change. The soil is literally melting, so the foundations need to respond to these changes. Even though the foundations still had to anchor the building, we prioritised adaptability. It’s about how you approach the site, and we always pay close attention to how our design interacts with the ground.

Joint success

CR: After a few trials at competitions, we recently received 1st prize for a school in Martigny, in collaboration with lablab and the landscape design firm En-Dehors. The site is located in the plain, near a river. The only topography is the dam that separates them. It was clear for us that the project had to crystallize around this landscape element. 

MD: The city envisions this river area as a long public park—a shared public space. One of the challenges was integrating the school’s outdoor areas into this larger park, creating a sense of flow. This was achieved by using the slope to connect different levels, and at the building scale, ensuring the school responds to the dam.

CR: We built the story from this site-specific feature we identified. There are three buildings: The school, the gymnasium, and the daycare. They all interact in a very different way with the site. In the sections, you will see how the buildings engage with the ground levels. In the plan, the school detaches itself from the topography to ensure constant light during the day and various qualities of outdoor spaces around it. 

The gymnasium connects to the site through public tribunes that extend the line of the dam, while the students’ entrance opens towards the neighbourhood on the plain. The daycare operates as an independent volume, defining its own courtyard.

MD: While the building is new, the project incorporates elements of reuse, particularly in the outdoor spaces, where industrial structures are preserved to maintain the site’s industrial character. For the school itself, we were very site-specific in our material choices. On visiting the site, we realised the building context was composed of heteroclite elements. We saw test excavations revealing layers of sedimentation from the river and glaciers. Inspired by the geology and surrounding mineral cliffs, we chose earth for the slabs, concrete for the primary structure, and ceramic for the facade. 

CR: I think that today, the key to school competitions lies also in the outdoor spaces. How does your building enhance the quality of its surrounding context? That’s what matters most. Collaborating with En-Dehors was a real added value. While a landscape architect isn’t always mandatory, we believe their involvement is crucial to the success of the project.

Impact through engagement

MD: Having this kind of project also gives you the freedom to choose the other smaller projects you want to work on. And, outside our practice, Charlotte is involved in the SIA (The Swiss Society of Engineers and Architects), and I’m engaged in local politics in my village. We've realised that to have a real impact, we can’t just stay within the architectural world. We need to be talking to people outside of architecture, especially at the local political level. It’s important to learn how to communicate architectural ideas to non-architects. I think, in general, architects need to get out of their “boxes” and confront society more directly. There are financial realities to consider, and architecture has to be justified to the public. Without a culture of architecture within the population, we risk creating uninspired buildings. So, if we want to change that, we need to show it through our practice, but we also need to work on making people more aware of architectural issues and engaging with politics.

CR: It’s not just about confirmation within a group of architects where everyone agrees—it’s about challenging ourselves and the system.