Learning through process

MS: The architectural scene in Switzerland and its building culture is partly based on its competition system. When you start out, opportunities may come through family connections or knowing someone in need of an architect, but another opportunity comes from competitions. This system is highly structured and organised, yet open and accessible to all architects. In fact, you don’t even have to be a licensed architect to enter—students compete alongside established offices. This gives you the freedom to build knowledge and gain experience

Luc Kummer and I made a very conscious decision at the beginning of our collaboration to focus entirely on competitions. We spent four years fully immersed in them. Fully committed, we could explore topics deeply and develop our own ideas. Losing a competition was never a problem; the value lay in the process itself—the learning, the experimentation, the fun was the driving force. 

We even participated in some competitions purely for our own research. That may sound very academic, but the point is that open competitions allowed us to explore our architecture by doing and reflecting on our process. 

This became a strong foundation for our practice.  

Frameworks for exploration

LK: We’re not always good with a blank page—we need a brief. When we have a brief—whether it’s about how many classrooms, what kind of program, and so on—we can focus. The brief opens up the possibility to engage with typology, architecture, structure, and all the interconnected elements. That’s the research side of it: digging into something and having the time to really explore, within a framework. 

We strongly believe in the value of exploring a typology in depth—school buildings, for example. To dive into it, test different methods, typologies, and strategies. In that sense, designing as research means having the chance to dig deep into a subject. A competition becomes a way to explore a topic—much like writing a text. You develop a thought, work on it, analyse it and sharpen the story over and over again. In the best situations, you surprise yourself through your own process. 

In 2018, we submitted for the Foundation Award, a Swiss prize for young architects. We used the submission as an opportunity to reflect on what we were actually doing. This reflection led us to develop a method for action/analysis and to formulate the ambition to create very precise concepts.

Becoming architects

MS: Both Luc and I have kind of the same story. In Switzerland, we have what’s called the “duales Bildungssystem.” So, from age 16 to 20, we did an apprenticeship as architectural draughtsmen, where you’re employed in an architectural office three or four days a week, and then one or two days a week you go to professional school. At 16, maybe your head is in a different place, but you become part of a team that is producing, talking, living and building architecture. And that really shapes your path from a very young age. By the time we were 20, we knew how to plan a building and how a planning team works together. We had a solid foundation. 

After the apprenticeship, we proceeded to study architecture. To really learn to design freely, you have to think beyond borders. When you design and you’re guided by rules and things you know, you limit your freedom. So we had to overwrite some what we’ve learned. That’s also an important process but not an easy one. But when you manage to overwrite what you’ve learned and keep it in your “back pocket” for when you need it, it’s very powerful. 

A continuous learning space

LK: In 2018, winning a competition allowed us to professionalise our office. From then on, our focus included clients, project management, and running an office. Starting the office, setting up a team, becoming professional, and completing projects—these are all milestones. The hard part, especially for a young office, is balancing live projects with competitions—it’s difficult to find resources for both. 

Our first project, a primary school in Ennetbaden, was the very kickoff of KUMMER/SCHIESS. It was also our first selective competition in which we qualified as a ‘Nachwuchsbüro.’ This means you don’t need a built reference to apply, and it will be judged entirely on quality in our case of competition entries.

Ennetbaden is very defined by its topography. It’s steep and highly characteristic. It’s a very complex, multi-layered site. The challenge was to find the perfect place for the school. What we did was follow the slope—maximising the playground area by placing our building as close as possible to the edge of the underground buildings, adapting to the existing slope and the natural configuration of the landscape. 

It’s essentially a five-story hall with no central columns—only columns at the edges—so it’s like five halls stacked vertically. Unlike typical schools, which often have repeated, uniform rooms, this building has different rooms, sizes, and uses. A key design move was placing the staircase outside the building, keeping the structure clean and efficient, while giving an expansive view of the surrounding topography. This external “Treppenturm” (staircase tower) is large enough to have its own presence—it’s more than just a staircase. Together with the structure and the public pathway (“Durchgang”) that runs through the building, it creates a strong spatial connection and keeps the school always in view as you move through it. Another key element is that we avoided a classic basement—there’s no level that feels entirely underground. The lowest floor opens fully to the surroundings, so as you walk through the pathway, you’re always connected to the building through windows and views. We achieved this with three entrance levels, allowing access from different points on the site. Despite the simple rectangular plan, this creates surprising diversity and a strong connection between inside and outside.

In terms of flexibility, our structure allowed decisions about wall placement even during the building process. It’s worth mentioning that we initially won with a wooden school structure, but, as often happens, costs became an issue, and we had to switch to concrete. Despite this change, the prefabricated concrete structure closely matched the original wooden dimensions, helping us preserve the core DNA of our proposal.

Designing for adaptability

MS: The educational building ‘Breiten’ in Affoltern am Albis, near Zurich, is another significant project for our office, completed in May 2025. The site is in a residential area, where most surrounding buildings are three stories. The key question—similar to Ennetbaden—was how to stack the program while maintaining high-quality outdoor space. As a side note, we’ve lost several competitions by placing kindergardens on rooftops or upper floors, as clients usually want direct access to outdoor areas. Here, we faced the same challenge. Early on, we decided that a compact three-story building would allow for a larger outdoor area. Spreading the program over just two levels would have taken up most of the site, so we committed fully to the compact approach. The building was positioned to separate the parking zone from the main outdoor space, with office areas connected to the parking, while the southern side is dedicated entirely to outdoor activities.

So again, this is another example of a strong structural idea. In Ennetbaden, the space-defining walls followed the alignment of the structure. But in Affoltern, the idea is more of an open plan: The structure is concrete, but the interior spatial walls are wooden, placed next to the columns. That makes the building highly flexible and open. In that way, it's very efficient, and also adaptable—qualities we all learned to appreciate in architectural school. If you look at the facade, it’s composed of two systems coming together. On the entrance side—the south—you have vertical wooden panels. On the east and west, where the working spaces are, you have solid parapets. It was very interesting for us to explore how those two facade geometries merge. From outside, you can even see the interior side of the facade, which creates a very special moment. And to keep the veranda visually tied to the main building, we extended the parapet belt across it. Even though it’s a wooden structure, the veranda feels tightly integrated—like a belt holding the building together. This idea of having a strong structure—like the bones of the body—gives you spatial freedom. A repetitive, simple structure can become very interesting when it allows different responses to different conditions: one part connects to the street, another to a park, another to the interior. 

Learning from setbacks

LK: Another project, Kloten, near Zurich Airport, was a school building competition we lost in the final of two rounds. Launched in 2018 and concluding in 2019, the process lasted nearly a year. Eight teams were initially selected, and when the jury couldn’t choose between the two finalists, we and the other team advanced anonymously to a second phase with a refined brief. 

Kloten was clearly inspired by Ennetbaden. We had a steep learning curve there, and it flowed into this project. The building is divided into four units, almost like train wagons. Each unit has its own access, and the overall layout allows for both primary and secondary school programs. The staircase type is a ‘double helix’—two separate staircases that never land on the same level. One side leads to the primary school, the other to the secondary. So, you’re kind of moving back and forth through the building in a rhythmic way. It creates dynamic interactions between interior and exterior, between units. Everything—structure, services, technical systems—was integrated within this idea. The building functioned like an organism. It wasn’t just about creating complexity, but also about making the system work. Because of the scale of the project, this was really important for us. We also used it as a chance to build strong collaborations—with engineers, fire specialists, planners. For us, architecture isn’t something we design and then add technical stuff to afterward. It’s more natural for us to integrate everything from the start. Even though this project wasn’t built—and it’s now six years old—it really shaped how we work. We’ve translated many ideas from Kloten into later projects, in new ways. 

Towards a new phase 

MS: Over the last three years, we’ve completed three projects. Now we’re entering a new phase. We’re not a young office any more—not under 40. In Switzerland, turning 40 actually matters for competitions; once you pass that line, the system treats you differently. The upside is that we now have references. At the end of last year, we won a competition for a school building in collaboration with Ramser Schmid Architekten. It’s a completely different typology from our previous school buildings, which makes it exciting. It has a sportshall underneath the school—so a new set of spatial relationships to explore too. We’re at a turning point. We’ve finished buildings, gathered experience and references, and that’s exciting. The next step can’t—and shouldn’t—be the same.