Henri Mardi

A generation with room to begin

RP: There are many reasons why Switzerland has so many young architectural practices. The first is that architecture occupies an important place in Swiss culture. There are many architects  and architecture is widely valued. But we also have to be honest: another fundamental reason is the country's economic situation. There is work. Switzerland is building continuously, the population is growing and there is a strong demand for construction - and therefore also for architects. Economic conditions also make it easier for many people to start their own practice. It is not necessarily about your family providing resources, but about having an environment that allows you to take risks with financial safety nets. Plus, the academic system plays an important role, with some of the most renowned universities between Zürich, Lausanne, and Mendrisio. Studying at places like ETH Zurich allows you to build an important professional network, with some graduates then continuing to work in the academic sector. Salaries for a part-time teaching position can provide enough financial stability to support yourself while establishing your own office. Another important factor is the Swiss, open competition system, which creates real opportunities for young practices. Winning just one can completely change the future of an office.

ZC: There is also the administrative framework, which makes it relatively easy to start practising. As soon as you graduate, you are legally allowed to practise as an architect. Many young architects are less willing to work extremely long hours for relatively low salaries in a rather anonymous environment. If they are going to work twelve hours a day, including weekends, for limited pay, they often prefer to do it in a smaller practice or by developing their own projects.

RP: We belong to a generation educated according to one model but practising under another. The shift towards renovation, adaptive reuse and densification has changed the kinds of projects architects are asked to imagine. Instead of dreaming only about new buildings, many young architects began asking what could be done with an existing building, a modest budget or a village house. Those constraints demanded invention.

From Geneva to Henri Mardi

ZC: Raphaël and I met at Christian Dupraz Architecture Office in Geneva. It was an excellent environment and we learned a great deal there.

RP: Coming from Zürich, I moved to Geneva because I wanted a change and to reconnect with the French-speaking part of Switzerland, where my family comes from. At first, I felt it was the wrong architectural decision. I thought everything was happening in Zürich or Basel. But once I arrived, I discovered a completely different architectural culture.

ZC: At Christian Dupraz, we worked together on MICROCOSME, a competition for the new ITU (International Telecommunication Union) Headquarters in Geneva. The office won the competition, and developing that project made us question the kind of architecture we wanted to practice. Soon after, we decided to start our own practice and focus on different kinds of projects. Christian was extremely supportive and even offered us the opportunity to begin independently on a first project. Although that project never went ahead, it gave us the confidence to take the step. We really started working on the practice at the end of 2019. And then COVID happened at the beginning of 2020. In a way, it was the worst possible moment to leave our jobs.

RP: We had imagined those first months would be full of energy: meeting people, making ourselves known, building a network. Instead, everything came to a standstill because of COVID. Since we were not using social media either, we were almost working in isolation. It was a very difficult way to begin, but we survived.

ZC: Looking back, it is difficult to say what impact it had. On the one hand, everything happened much more slowly. On the other, that slower pace perhaps gave us the time to test ideas and develop our approach more carefully.

Transforming the ordinary

RP: Most of our early commissions involved transforming ordinary buildings - often buildings with no recognised architectural value, or ones that had been heavily altered over time. 

ZC: So far we have not yet encountered many projects with requirements to follow strict conservation principles. We actually enjoy this very much because it meant starting from something that already existed, understanding it and transforming it without being burdened by the idea that everything old had to be preserved exactly as it was. We realised that many of these ordinary buildings still had remarkable qualities. 

RP: I think that is a very important part of our work: looking at ordinary buildings and asking what is worth keeping and what can be transformed. We are always trying to turn what might initially seem like a weakness into an opportunity. What really shaped us was working with private clients who were not architectural idealists. They came to us because they needed an architect,and they had very concrete needs. Our role was to respond to those needs while making the most of what already existed. Sometimes that meant pushing the possibilities of a building much further than the clients had imagined. 

We have two projects in Valais that illustrate this approach particularly clearly. One of them, Sarreyer la Grande, started with a simple question from the client: could an old village house be divided into two equal apartments? The house had already been altered several times, with extensions from the 1960s, the 1990s and more recent years, and it was in poor condition. Rather than simply dividing the building, we decided to work vertically, almost like two interlocking Lego pieces. This allowed it to function either as one large house or as two independent apartments. We also introduced an additional room that could belong to either apartment, making the whole building extremely flexible.

ZC: Our second project follows a very similar logic. The client owned their childhood home, which had become a rental property with a single apartment, and initially wondered whether the attic could simply be converted. When we studied the house, we realised that this would not really solve the real problem. It was a large nineteenth-century village house without a garden, and one oversized apartment would have been difficult to rent. Instead, we again divided the building vertically, revealing the original structure hidden beneath later alterations. The result was two independent triplex apartments, each organised across several levels and making full use of the existing volume.

RP: For us, these projects were really exercises in optimisation. Within rural areas in Switzerland, you can often densify the interior of an existing building because the exterior envelope already defines its limits. We wanted to make full use of that opportunity. Our clients were not asking for an architectural statement or an iconic image. They wanted homes that worked well and made the best possible use of what they already owned. We shared that ambition. Since the walls and the roof already exist, why not make the fullest possible use of them? For us, that is also a response to contemporary territorial and environmental questions. The goal is not to produce the strongest architectural gesture, but to make the best possible use of what we have at our disposal.

Designing a maison de quartier

RP: At the beginning of this year, we won a competition in La Chapelle-Les Sciers, a neighbourhood set across Lancy and Plan-les-Ouates,  and secured another major project in Valais. Those two projects are really changing the scale of the office. Everything we had been doing over the past six years suddenly crystallised into these new opportunities.

ZC: The project in Lancy/ Plan-les-Ouates is for a maison du quartier (a neighbourhood-based civic facility designed to host multiple activities and serve as a shared social space). On the competition jury, there were both architects and future users of the building, and apparently, it was the users who convinced the architects to look more carefully at our proposal.

RP: I think, at first, some architects felt the project was perhaps a little too friendly - almost too pleasant to be taken seriously. But the users immediately connected with it. Some even told us, “As soon as I saw the project, I wanted it to win.” We took that as a real compliment because they are the people who will actually use the building.

Before designing it, we visited the recently completed Maison de Quartier des Libellules near Le Lignon. We spent time there speaking with the people using the building and observing how everyday life actually unfolded. That convinced us that simply providing the required rooms was not enough. A maison du quartier also needs informal and undefined spaces - buffer zones where all the activities that cannot be anticipated in a programme can naturally take place. We kept the existing house on the site and organised the new building around it. The existing ground floor was retained, a two-storey timber extension was added above it, as well as an important two-storey extension around it, containing the two main halls of the house in the height of the three adjacent levels. A new roof completed the building. We also introduced something that was not required by the programme: a covered terrace on the roof. For the users, that space became a real gift.

ZC: At the same time, we wanted the building to feel welcoming rather than monumental. The project's strength lay in its combination of architectural clarity with a playful quality and generosity towards the users.

A different scale, the same practice

RP: At the beginning of last year, after looking at all the projects we had completed, we realised we could not continue relying on small private commissions. Quite simply, we were not earning enough. Around that time, Zeno also started working as a researcher at HEPIA (Haute école du paysage, d'ingénierie et d'architecture de Genève). We made a conscious decision to stop taking on small-scale projects because we realised we could not build a sustainable practice that way.

It was a double gamble. We decided to start entering competitions again and accept the risk that comes with them. We entered two or three competitions and won one. At the same time, we received the commission for a much larger project in Valais, for the restructuration of 4 buildings in Versegères. In many ways, it is a continuation of everything we had been doing before - transforming old barns and village houses, some protected and some not - but on a much larger scale. That commission is also the result of the relationships we built through our previous projects. The client is someone we already knew. He owns a timber company and had worked with us before. He saw the way we approached those earlier projects, appreciated our work, and asked whether we would be interested in taking on something much larger. 

ZC: Looking ahead, what interests us is continuing to work on larger projects while still maintaining direct control over them. The competition we won in La Chapelle-Les Sciers, and the new project in Valais are both at a scale that the two of us can still lead personally. They are not enormous projects, and that is precisely what makes them interesting. In addition to that, other smaller but interesting projects came along: the renovation of a multistory outside connection between two school buildings, the extension of a house near Geneva or the transformation of offices into apartments. 

RP: All these new projects represent the right next step for us. We can grow as a practice, but in a measured way, without suddenly finding ourselves responsible for a fifty-million-franc building that would be completely beyond the scale at which we want to work.

Entering this new phase made us think about how we position ourselves as a practice in the public eye. For a long time, we were also not very good at communicating what we do. We would look at other practices from our generation and admire their drawings, competition panels, references, texts, Instagram accounts or websites. But seeing our buildings completed made us realise that the architecture itself was good, even if we had never developed a sophisticated theoretical discourse around it. We have often worked intuitively, without stopping afterwards to formulate a clear narrative. But nothing we do is arbitrary. Every decision is thought through. We would rather devote our energy to thinking carefully, building well and then explaining our work, rather than the other way around.