[conférence] Herzog & de Meuron

Good evening, we have the honor and pleasure to welcome this evening Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, who are both here, it's an exception, it's very rare. So they are here as part of the cycle 'Great Conference City of Today and Tomorrow'. They are among the greatest architects in the world, they are major international figures both for their production and their theoretical reflection on architecture and the city. The conference will take place in two parts: first, Jacques Herzog will give a lecture and present the projects of Herzog & de Meuron, and second, we will continue with a conversation oriented towards the question of the city and open to the public. So as an introduction, I will give the traditional summary, which is very delicate to do with Jacques and Pierre. So Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron were both born in Basel, they studied architecture at the ETH Zurich from 1970 to 1975 with two great professors who particularly marked them: Aldo Rossi and Adolf Schnebli. They founded their agency in Basel in 1978, which today has ten subsidiaries in Hamburg, London, Madrid, and New York, and employs nearly 350 people. The Ricola storage facility built in 1987 made them known internationally, then the Dominus Winery in Napa Valley, California in 1998. Their incredible creative energy has continued to intensify and take shape around the world with the Tate Modern in London notably in 2000, Prada Tokyo in 2003, the de Young Museum in San Francisco in 2005, the Allianz Arena stadium in Munich in 2005, and obviously many other things in between and after, and also the National Stadium in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics, and still many ongoing projects. They are working on nearly 30 international projects, notably the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg which should be completed in 2012, the VitraHaus in Weil am Rhein whose delivery is planned for 2010, an extension of the Tate that we should be able to visit in 2012. Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron teach as visiting professors at Harvard and at the ETH Zurich, where they created a special department of this school, the ETH Studio Basel, an institute dedicated to research on contemporary life. These research projects give rise to numerous publications. Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron received in the same year, 2007, the highest award of the Pritzker Prize and the prestigious Praemium Imperiale awarded by the Japan Art Association. For the uninitiated, the Pritzker Prize is also called the Nobel Prize of architecture, and the Praemium Imperiale is called the Arts Prize, and it suits them well. Their work has been the subject of numerous publications and exhibitions, and their path has crossed several times the history of Arc en Rêve. In October 1990, we already showed their first project in the exhibition 'Ouverture' which inaugurated the great gallery of Arc en Rêve at the Entrepôt. In October 1998, Jacques Herzog returned to Bordeaux to give a lecture. Here in 2000, we devoted an edition to them that honors our collection of postcards. In spring 2005, we exhibited the wonderful 'Réfectoire des Vendangeurs' built in Pomerol for Château Cheval Blanc in the context of the exhibition 'Espèces Nord-Sud'. It was not conceived in that framework but exhibited in this framework, placed under the title 'Faire Habiter l'Homme là encore autrement'. And in 2007, in the edition of the educational kit 'Un Bâtiment, des Architectes', the Munich stadium was among the fifteen works chosen to teach children to see and love architecture by discovering extraordinary buildings. To conclude this presentation and open the lecture by Jacques Herzog, I will quote Nicolas Olsberg, director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, who devoted an exhibition to Herzog & de Meuron under the title 'Archaeology of the Imaginary'. It is clear that Herzog and de Meuron perceive the mandate at the frontier of fantasy and scientific rigor, of play and difference, of metaphysics and materiality. Their built works seem to profile on a horizon where surface and depth coexist, subtlety and sublimity, metaphors and reality, fluctuations and permanence. Herzog and de Meuron find a kind of fundamental serenity, an angle of repose.

Also that one, then we need to turn off all the light, and also that one behind yours in the control room, but do you think it's that one that blinds us? I hope they won't make mistakes with scissors in the dark, and above all, offer simple things. First of all, I apologize for the fact that my French is getting worse and worse, for a reason I think I don't use it enough, and that is also perhaps due to the fact that in recent years we haven't really worked in France, and I hope we can change that, notably because of a very important project in Paris that I will present today, and we also have the chance to work on a project in Lyon, and soon I think we might have another project not too far from Basel in France. I will talk about several projects, but always with this idea of the city behind, because all the projects we do now, because they have become projects of a different scale, really public projects, projects that are made to give a city a certain image, but also of course because they are projects like the stadium in Beijing, you will see later, projects that are made to transform a city, and one can always ask oneself as an architect: are we capable of using an architectural project to really do this work of transformation and to establish or install something that did not exist before? So we see more and more that the real contribution of the architect is in this capacity to seduce the client, to seduce people, to seduce the city with the intention of showing or bringing something to a place that was not there before and that was difficult to imagine. It is a bit in this context that I see the projects I present today. You can now turn on the lights again. I will present, I think, six projects. I prepared this but it's too many images as I see, but I will present, I can perhaps renounce the project in India, but six projects in six very different cities, and since all the projects are projects in the making, they are unrealized projects, it might be a bit dry, so I start with a built project, and it's a true fireworks of beauty and light: it's the Beijing stadium. You know it through the media. Does it work now? It's dark back there. We still need to turn off, I think. I understand the concern is that you are filming, you need light to film for the people when it's broadcast, but we must not be blinded. So I don't know how we'll do. Because of the film.

Yes, but we'll manage. Football matches are more important. But he doesn't have that because Jacques, Jacques, there are 160 people sitting in this room, there are 400 to 500 who... they need to see you but you need to... because we are blinded.

So I start with the stadium in Beijing, and I show... I said I start with that, still a bit more... because it's... there is too much light, too much light, it's light pollution. Cities were more beautiful without light. And laborious also a lot of light, but the light is quite precise. I show some images without much commentary. It was done during the inauguration of the stadium a year ago. This space between the exterior and interior was especially important for this idea of the public, of public life, which I briefly mentioned at the beginning. Now it's the inauguration on August 8, 2008. This model of the stadium made with... So that's how it presented itself to the world as a miracle. In fact, you also see that we understood it a bit like a miracle. The fact that this stadium, this project, was built seemed almost incredible to us. It's an impossible project basically, because of its complexity, its degree of innovation, everything that was achieved had never been done before: the complexity of the structure but also the architectural content. So the image of accepting this architecture was unimaginable and outside of China practically impossible. But to be able to do that was not only almost impossible because of this complexity, but that's why I show this image. It was an incredibly hard and difficult path, and Pierre more than I experienced phases that were sometimes almost absurd, like for example on the occasion of... as they say, during the weekend, it's December 24, a day when it's not obvious to visit China, and at the very moment when we had to take the pause when he called, it was refused to Pierre. So there were many signs of aggressiveness and difficulty and hostility, and so there were many moments when we lost a bit of confidence and also the imagination or the thought that we didn't think it was possible to realize the stadium as we had imagined. But the more we visited the site, the more we saw the first pieces, the first samples of steel, we understood that they were really ready to realize the project exactly according to the plans. So the metal was really shining in three dimensions, a work that was almost impossible to realize in conventional factories, transported across all of China with a logistics that was also difficult to realize outside of a democracy. You see there the stadium was almost completed. That was, for example, a very important moment for us to be reassured that the point where the facade and the roof become one thing, curved and not simplified, because there were always suspicions. You never really saw through these two layers of suspicion and reality, to understand that the stadium would really become what we imagined. But finally we understood that the Chinese are so intelligent and so strategic—I'm talking about the government—that they wanted the project to become the global success it finally became. But it was also for us a difficult start to imagine a project, to imagine a stadium that would fit well with the country, that could have the success we wanted, that would be received in this incredible way at the moment of the opening or even before, it had become a national icon. And today when we go to China, the Chinese even mention the stadium in a context with the famous... At the beginning, we didn't have much time for the competition and the decision phase. We had ideas of really a nest without really pronouncing it, something very dense but not, let's say, a membrane layer as we had conceived for the stadium in Munich, something much more structural, something where space is conceived by the structural members, so everything is one thing almost like in a medieval cathedral. So we tinkered, we imagined, we really worked almost primitively at the beginning because it wasn't obvious, it's not easy to think of form and geometry at the same time. And soon after, we continued this creative process by adding elements that were to be part of the stadium, almost like furniture, lamps, seats for the park around and for the interior of the stadium. Because this is a prototype of a lamp that was later used in the park that surrounds the stadium, where the... to say which is like a dragon, lamps that now we are transforming so that they can be used on the global market, so that they can be bought and sold worldwide. A very important idea that I mentioned at the beginning was this idea of the public, of public space. We had this image in mind of Paris, of the space under the Eiffel Tower. If you see the people there with their costumes, their hats, their umbrellas, it was a very distant era, very far from us today. The Eiffel Tower remains a magical and very important building. And if we imagine the heads of the time of the... to imagine such a space was unthinkable, it was impossible to imagine such a space under the console, under the Eiffel Tower. So the success of this building has to do with this unimaginable space that was nevertheless realized during this world exposition. And like the Olympic Games, a world exposition is something a bit absurd and stupid. Both events are not really important but can be interesting and useful to create impossible things that could become icons or very important spaces for a city. Very important because it remains... the term of seduction I used remains important because they are capable of seducing people, attracting them, also giving them an identity. It was all the more important that we understood that the Chinese really use public space. They use public space to dance outside, to make music, and that is contrary to the Japanese who refuse public space. The Chinese use it, they claim it. And apparently all these ingredients worked. As I said, the stadium, beyond what the architecture critics say—for once the critics were very positive—the people really judged, accepted the stadium, it really became popular, an unthinkable regret for us until now. So it really became something that we find in daily life in Beijing. And the proof is that today, the post-Olympic life of the stadium is very important. The stadium remains something very important, very accepted by the people. It is visited every day by 30,000 or more spectators who pay an entrance fee, who use the stadium as a park, inside and outside, for weddings, parties. And the state wants to free the stadium for all commercial functions, at the stadium level in the underground, of course there are shops and things like that, but the stadium has become a true public zone.

Now I present five projects that we are developing, each of which tries to have a role, let's say not similar in this dimension of Beijing, but which tries to make a contribution in a city, in very different cities, while using things that remain important, that remain specific to a city. So for the Triangle project in Paris, of which you may have seen images, it's a very Parisian project in the sense that it really fits into this city that I think is perhaps the most beautiful city in the world. Certainly it is the most precise, the most crystalline, the most thought-out, perhaps the most steeped in an ideology of beauty and perfection than any other city in the world. It is a city, especially north of the Seine, that has an almost Haussmannian, even absolutist character. A bit less in the south of the city. You see this network, these intersections of streets, important boulevards creating stars. It's the system of stars, the sky that has this idea of the infinite and of very precise direction, and the monuments that mark and connect these infinite axes or help to reorient oneself. It's an idea of artificiality and perfection that I find perhaps in the pyramids but not in a contemporary city. I feel that even from the 18th and 19th centuries, the accent is there. The idea of the infinite which in the calm and in the case of La Défense remains active. It is in this perspective literally that we conceived the Triangle project. You see there the Triangle project, the way it could fit into the sky or the silhouette of Paris, from the périphérique zones. And it is positioned very precisely so that it can open a perspective, an orientation that opens or connects Issy-les-Moulineaux with... what is it? Communicating with the 14th, 15th arrondissements. So we do a bit of the work that Haussmann could not do in this district, and others neither. It's as if the energy of Paris to realize itself was broken, stopped. It's also quite bizarre that despite this almost obsession with beauty and perfection, the périphérique is the last wall built in a city in Europe, and it's almost like a pot inside which this idea of perfection is preserved, so that outside it can behave a bit more chaotically, more like other cities in the world. You see, it's a perspective that we especially like because it's there that we understand that it's a pyramid but not really a pyramid either. It's a defined and undefined object, an object that consists of very smooth surfaces but also rougher, more irregular surfaces. It clearly opens perspectives and connects them, as I said, inside Paris with the outside of Paris. The form is a form geometrically more or less defined but in a very pragmatic form that is deduced from light, from height, from setbacks, of course, and other things. Above all, it's also a vertical city, it's like a neighborhood that we have elevated vertically. That's why we made this comparison. We wanted to achieve a density and vitality not only on the ground floor but also everywhere in the building. At the beginning, of course, the program was much more mixed. We absolutely wanted to integrate different programs to attract different people, not only one company or one type of people who come to work. For this reason, we also introduced a vertical transport network that was like tram or metro lines, and diagonals that were like more public lines or an RER system. So we try, because we are taking up the project in the coming months, this idea of mixité of course, but it's clear that everything tries to revolutionize or transform the idea of the European skyscraper. It's difficult with the economic conditions and the pressure on that side. Bizarrely, it's not mixité that has the most success, but uniformity. But of course, the future of the tall building is precisely in this public life that we could inscribe in these buildings and also the fact that there are different programs.

The second project is in London, as you know, it has become a great public success. It was in 2000 that we were able to open the museum, and it's the moment of the queen entering this turbine hall. The Turbine Hall is a space that we saw, unlike other architects who made proposals for the transformation of Tate into a museum, we were the only ones to offer this space. In London, you should know, it was a power station and it was conceived as a cathedral, but a clandestine cathedral, with this effect to dream, not to attract people. And we emptied this space, we made it hollow and we made it bigger, and bizarrely—not bizarrely, fortunately—it became a huge success. It became a place where people meet, even if they don't necessarily visit the Tate because they are aficionados of art. It has become a hyper-public place. It attracts 5 million visitors each year, it's the most visited museum in the world, the most visited art museum in the world. Counting the Louvre, I don't know, but they also have Egypt and all that, but we put contemporary artists with the Egyptians, we would have even more zeros. But in any case, it became something. We still had to reverse the initial idea of the building, and of course Foster's bridge connects the two banks of the Thames. The south side remained hostile to this public life, but despite that, it attracted very important investments. It became a... it has known very important developments. It completely transformed this part of the city. And this plan shows a bit what is happening in the south and why this extension will take place in the south to open this axis between Southwark and... the Thames, and to develop this part which is now like a good heart, and also to have an advantage vis-à-vis the neighbors who are building, building, building, and one face is built, the Tate could no longer react. So the Tate, for economic reasons as well, must react to be able to participate in this boom of which they are the origin. Yes, all the projects that are being done, horrors a bit like everywhere, these are Rogers' towers that are being done now. I'm not saying horrors, I hope you don't misunderstand, but it's buildings a bit like everywhere. We made a project at the beginning that we rejected because we understood it was horrible, but we had to go fast, we had to relaunch this project. But we understood that we didn't want a stack of blocks. We wanted something that... we still took some time to understand how to really make an extension of the Tate, an immense brick building. So the first idea was to do it in brick, but we found it a bit stupid, that's why we found something else, to finally come back to brick. To come back to brick as the logical material, also the logical form to form with the existing building something, an organism that functions from the inside to the outside. It's very, very important. You certainly know many museums that have been enlarged but that no longer function. It's very important not to make a museum and a place, a museum next to it, where one is always better than the other, that there is not this idea of different levels of quality, of differences in the sense of qualifying or disqualifying elements, but to make something that offers differences as a quality. And that was a long work, a very interesting, very intense intellectual work, a magnificent challenge, thanks to the very intense collaboration with Nick Serota who came, certainly ten times this year, who came to Basel very often to discuss really every space, every gallery, almost like with Château Cheval Blanc for a private house. The geometry is very logical, very simple. There is this linearity, this perpendicular geometry, very disturbing. It's a very classical museum, we want to keep that, but fortunately there is this slightly oblique geometry that we must take up and that introduces a logical element that is different, that deviates from this perpendicular geometry. So we have a reason but also an argument to change geometry, to introduce something that also introduces a change, a difference inside. We don't want to repeat the same site, two galleries. As I said, we want to introduce another element in this vertical promenade that the building offers, contrary to the horizontal promenade that the current building offers. And the new building develops around a series of stations, like stations of chapels in a religious path. So it starts in the basement, as we will see, and it brings people to very, very different places, and each time it offers views, perspectives, a difference towards the different parts of the city. It starts in the underground, so it is really anchored in the earth and in the existing. This is the existing building, this is the... with the ramp that goes down, and all this part developed in the lower part, the underground, also from there in the vertical. This is the arm, the old... which is now the... major galleries. These are underground spaces incredibly intense and raw, but which have a height, brutal almost, and we want to keep these... while offering galleries. This is a real model that shows a possible installation, an object by... I show this to demonstrate to what extent we will offer galleries that are really different. There are performance spaces, not really galleries for visual art, but there will be rooms for education, for different things that one must offer today in a museum of such importance. And notably the path, the boulevard that leads people through this building, that connects the two buildings, was the most important work: to make something really fascinating and important. And here we come back again to this idea of the public, of this new public space that wants to be attractive and important and seductive for people. I won't show you, we made hundreds of models to study how we could connect the different zones of the building. Of course, since the opening in 2000, we have done other very important projects, notably the Schaulager in Basel, which is certainly one of the most important buildings of our career. And there, in this building, without knowing it, we had already developed certain spaces that are now used in another dimension, in another way, but these spaces have become important as a model also for the extension of the Tate. In their capacity to link vertically, to open perspectives, to make people understand where they are and where they want to go with simple means, without using too many... The building is in sandstone and... This concrete structure, very solid, very simple, and very brutal almost, is the base, and also the material, the concrete that we extruded vertically and that creates the skeleton of the building. So it's a building with a concrete skeleton to start. You see, the... rises vertically, and the cladding in brick. These bricks that we will develop for this building are bricks that in their colors take up a bit the colors of the existing building, but it's a perforated wall, a perforated brick wall that lets the building breathe, that opens perspectives from the inside to the outside. And we have a work, as for other projects, very simple and primitive. Of course, we make the solid like everyone else, but we work a lot with the model at full scale with all the materials. Pierre and I sometimes are very impatient, we want to see, we want people, especially young people, to know that sometimes it's enough to take a piece of paper or cardboard or form to understand certain things without always using the computer and building a virtual model that is too slow, too primitive, too old. So sometimes primitive models are more contemporary. And of course, I say this is not real, it's a virtual image, it's important to understand how in the future it could be in reality. So you see there the concrete inside, the concrete skeleton that offers a very solid interior life, not refined and white world like in a museum as we see very often now, especially in the United States. For this entrance area in the south, for this public zone, we also took as a model the Schaulager that I showed you before, some images of the interior with this ramp notably that brings people in, slightly descending towards the interior with the large scale. The simplicity but at the same time with this quality, economic.

A new project is in Brazil, it's the first project we do in Brazil. It's a dance and music center, a very large public project, certainly the first project of this kind in Brazil since the 1950s and 60s. And of course, it's fascinating to work in a city we didn't know, that we always had images in our heads, a gigantic city, very different of course from Basel, but also very different from Paris, London, and Beijing. So we are really lucky to get to know the world and cities through projects, because our projects force us to understand a city, to interpret it, to be able to make a contribution. It's an incredible chaos of buildings. And if... it's like a forest of buildings, and it's difficult to find important ingredients. Of course, there are important ones, especially through important buildings of modernism, let's say from the 1950s, 60s up to today, even a bit less today, but especially the heroic buildings of Niemeyer, of... all buildings that are reference points for all architects and that may have influenced us on our path. To make a building in this city, thanks also to this very direct way of using material, creating simple spaces but open to the exterior. Organic forms, the mix with people, human beings, plants, vegetation which is so important in São Paulo. It's really an element that hasn't really been used yet in the way it could be in the future. Another building by Niemeyer, from the exterior, it's the Biennale building. Our building uses ramps, public paths through a building, and this restaurant that we like a lot because of this plant that dominates the architecture, this roof offered by nature. The site is very interesting because it's in the heart of the city and in a neighborhood now a bit slow, a bit difficult, and the project is of course there to help transform the neighborhood. The project is still in a very conceptual phase, but the architecture we have in mind is also very close to a concept. It's not a very sculpted, very formal architecture, but almost primitive, archaic, that works precisely with horizontal bands and plants. It integrates into a park, to become this part. It's not yet a park, the existing park. The building serves to connect the two sides of the park, to integrate the different streets around into the neighborhood. It also fits into a system and leaves public space, green space, and other cultural places like the hall in São Paulo which is in this sign, vis-à-vis the dance center. You see that the neighborhood is also almost uniformly surrounded by buildings like in a forest. That's where the project will be built. Our project, of course a very conceptual model, is like a fabric of superimposed functions. It's a program: a dance school, a music school, performance halls for dance and music. So it's a place for a very public life. The building wants to be a building that can be used to walk through during the day by anyone, like at the Tate, for the... we would like people to come there just to see what it is, like a three-dimensional park, but also of course to make people meet who have nothing to do with each other. So the people of dance and music, instead of separating them into separate buildings, which is the client's intention, we want to make something like a... So you see a bit the idea of the project and how we will build it literally with bands of concrete platforms for now. Of course, it will be modified, it will be sculpted, but for now it's like a skeleton of very simple columns and then programmatic boxes. And finally, this composition is almost a textile composition because in the spaces between the concrete platforms, the concrete slabs, there are plants, very important and very mixed, very varied vegetation. There are of course slopes or boulevards that lead through the building. The central boulevard is described here in the different functions according to events. It links, let's say, there is an event in this sector or in the school or everywhere. It's a common architectural topography. These few images that I inscribe in this presentation of Brazil, of the Laban Centre in London, is also a very interesting project in this context because it's made for London, so it's a very homogeneous and very monolithic building, the opposite, one would say, of Brazil as a typology. But there too we use color, but of course colors that mix much more with the sky and the... sometimes the sky, the mist that we find very often in London, doesn't pass on this image where the color and the sky and the water mix almost to become one thing. Contrary to the concept in São Paulo where the concrete platforms, the use of color that we intend to use on the platforms, on the concrete or under the slabs, are much more striking, much stronger, and much more playful with the vegetation and the vitality of the people inside. Here color plays a role as a reflection and zones that transform the space according to the angle. And there too we have as a model that may be useful for São Paulo but also for other projects, it's the first time we developed this interior boulevard which is like an interior city around which there is a café, a library, a zone where people must meet, and it has become a very popular zone, very used by students.

Another very important element for the São Paulo project is this project, almost finished, but that one too, you probably don't know it. It will be finished at the end of this year, we will inaugurate it in December, but unfortunately I don't have other photos. It's a somewhat special garage in Miami, a garage that we wished to... in the vertical, we had permission to double the height without increasing the usable surface, to give this garage a different aspect and to inscribe or integrate programs other than a garage, that is, bars, cafes, shops. So it's a garage, a different typology of a garage as we know it, and it will certainly make an interesting contribution in this context of the... in Miami. Of course, it's interesting because there too we use a material for the structure, for the horizontal slabs and for the vertical pillars, and at the same time it's the space and the decoration and the ornamentation. So it's one thing, and it's also of course a model for what São Paulo could become. Some images of the model. There we used color for the different bands to give a color to each different program, and we also tinted, gave the same color to the people we put in the model to describe the path of these people. The yellows go to dance, the reds go to make music, the whites are neutral, to understand to what extent there is a possibility for people to meet. But in fact, some colors have become real. We thought of the artist like Adrian Schiess who works with color plates, so in certain parts of the building it could become a real element.

Well, that's Brazil. I think I won't show it, it's a very interesting project in India, but I think it would be too... you can imagine, it's an incredible journey around the world, and this constraint almost to understand the different way people live and use architecture. Otherwise I will bore you, it would be too long. I still have, just to be wise, to show you at least a few images of a story. Yes, show you this because it's so... I wanted to talk to you about two... the project because it's a city that was founded by the English, unfortunately, so they suffered this British colonization. It inspired this Victorian style which is also the basis of the contemporary city which now builds neighborhoods a bit like in Dubai, like everywhere in the world. While I also wanted to show images of our... but of Islamic architecture that came in the 13th century, and of Islamic architecture, especially the... it's incredible because there it's a completely different conception of architecture that we didn't know, buildings like mountains, like... from the earth, which of course thanks to its decoration has become very popular in the world, and of course it's very seductive and magnificent. But beyond that, what's incredible is that the interior of the buildings is not like ours, empty, it's not interiors, it's almost filled like a human body. So if you go inside, you find the exterior, so it's like two or three pots. So this facade is inside, it's like a lining. So they don't have... they fill it almost completely with sculpture, so it's a very fascinating conception, and it's very important for the conception of the project we will do, but you will see perhaps next time. Because it's too... But we go to Mexico, to Guadalajara, where we will make this museum in an incredible situation. So it's very fascinating, this place which is at the edge of this canyon, and of course it's very seductive, and we must sometimes resist the seduction of a landscape. You see the city of Guadalajara and this abrupt end due to this radical ravine. It's the site, it's there, and there was already a project, the famous project, truly really stupid, of the Guggenheim, this tower of a museum. So not only is it quite absurd to make a tower if you want to make a house because it's really not obvious, and it's a tower of such dimension, and what is also absurd, and I think this image is the proof, it's conceived as something independent of the city. It wants to be genius, it wants to be completely independent of the city, a pure object that rivals, so to speak, with the radicality of nature. So this project died due to problems, probably financial reasons as almost always with Guggenheim, and perhaps the absurdity of the project. The site remained the same, but we renounced these parts, so we moved the project back into the park, which is a very interesting, very important park because it connects this zone with the city, and especially this axis that goes from north to south, which is a very important axis because it divides the world of the rich from the world of the poor. This is the old city, and you will see later how we discovered so easily these two worlds. So this axis is very important, and this park that will attract people is very important to integrate this park, this axis into the concept of the museum so that it becomes a place for the entire population on both sides of the city. This plan shows, it's a plan that we constructed, that we even created. This axis is the distribution of the extremities of the pools, so the number of pools on one side clearly reveals the strong distribution of the two parts of the city. It's a fascinating city but relatively poor in monuments if you compare with what I just showed in São Paulo, for example, and this cathedral and a football stadium. There is this park, not very important, but at least there is this small contribution. But there is notably this classified park, the park of our site, which is a magnificent park because there are very beautiful trees, and it's really a place that has immense potential for people to come here. And we wanted to do this: it starts in the direction of the ravine. We wanted to make a project that integrates this park into the concept, that even uses the park as an exhibition space, but still offers this view towards the canyon. As always at the beginning, we tinkered a bit, we made a proposal of a tower simply moved back, to once again describe this absurdity. Of course, we said to ourselves that we repeat... the... we made a courtyard in a sense almost classic, like a Mexican hacienda, and we repeat this distribution of boxes that we tried a bit in the context of the... but also in the case of the VitraHaus, as Francine mentioned, a project almost finished that has become a very fascinating project because it's a pile of objects distributed a bit randomly, but of course not really random, but geometrically speaking, seen from the outside, it's quite... you don't immediately recognize an organization like a clearly defined ornament, a precise geometry. These are houses, so not abstract elements but well-defined elements, the elementary typology of a house that we used as a basic element for these constructions that serve to exhibit all the products of Vitra, which are made for private spaces, so house-type spaces, but with the combination, the fact that we stack them on top of each other creates spaces.

It works, it works. They are fine, I'm not used to it, I can't move too much. Thank you, that was enormous. So we had planned that in your talk you wouldn't talk too much about the city, but you talked a lot about it. We'll come back to it in the conversation. If we look quickly at your projects, isolated projects that go by too quickly, we see iconic buildings of monumental quality, yet the urban value is always strongly and judiciously affirmed. How do you work on this urban dimension? The projects you presented are eloquent; the project in Guadalajara is a nice demonstration. How do Herzog & de Meuron think? Can you say in a few sentences how Herzog & de Meuron rethink the relationship between city and architecture?

We observe in your work, in the history of your work, several generations of projects. So we can say a first generation of small size: the apartment building in Basel, for example, the signal box at Basel station, still Rico Line. Second generation with larger projects: the winery in California, the Forum in Barcelona, the Munich stadium, etc. And a third generation of mega-buildings: the Olympic stadium in Beijing, we are already in that order, the super skyscraper in New York, the Triangle project in Paris. How do you explain that? I would like to say that there is a real continuity between the first, second, and third generations, but they seem totally different. How do you explain this evolution? Is it simply due to the difference in scale of the programs? Is it linked to the increase in the agency's activity around 305 people and the arrival of new collaborators? And a third question I would also like you to react to, but you will answer as you see fit: are you induced or seduced by the international competition that imposes itself on your clients and probably on yourselves?

In the field of architecture, you situate yourself in the field of pictorial creation or on the side of minimalism, indeed imbued with a need for a bit of modernism in the art of geometry, the handling of materials, banality, classicism, as we saw in the interpretation of the monument. You often speak also with a touch of tourism in the celebration of the qualities of the existing buildings on which you intervene. You sometimes frequent organic architecture. This hybrid position characterizes your work; the originality seems inexhaustible. It still seems inexhaustible to us. In the field of life, where do you situate yourself? Let me explain: do you regret the absence of urban theory? We know the disasters of urban theories, which are intellectually fundamental but terrifying when they impose themselves to make the city. That said, today there are attempts at theorization capable of illuminating thought on the contemporary city: many works by researchers, geographers, philosophers, anthropologists, etc., who work on these questions. And on the side of practicing architects, there are the works of Koolhaas, theoretical works, notably 'Delirious New York', the theory of the 'generic city' by Christian de Portzamparc with his concept of the island, the practice of Jean Nouvel on the tyranny of hyper-contextuality, that of Lacaton & Vassal on the theme of experimentation. And you? What you told us earlier about thought and the project as potential is obviously a strong response. Can you tell us about the work you are doing within the Institute of the City that you created with Jacques?

On the question of the specific, when you talk about your work, you very, very often talk about the relationship of the local to the global, making particular reference to the responsibility that falls on us due to the internationalization of your practice, either from the point of view of the inscription of your projects on a planetary scale or from the point of view of programs of an international nature. But let's return to this local-global relationship. Koolhaas developed the concept he calls 'glocal'. Herzog & de Meuron place the specific at the heart of their discourse on the city. You excel, in fact, in your architectural projects in the management of flows, in the mastery of the relationship to the ground, in the expression of materiality, in the dialogue with tradition, in the relationship to the site. What are the conceptual tools that allow you to go from the conception of buildings to the transformation of entire territories? Was the methodology the same at the scale of Asian megalopolises as at the European metropolitan scale? We saw in the projects, for example, we saw it very well when you presented the Parisian project, these diagrams. Can you talk about this programmatic work that is not visible when the thing is realized?

How do you anticipate the possible evolutions of the faces of your buildings? This can happen for a shopping center that may become a wasteland, just like the headquarters of multinationals, or a stadium for example. This is a subject that interests us. In Bordeaux, you are realizing several stadiums. Generally, it is major sporting events that command the realization of large stadiums. The big event passed, the very large public equipment opens up to a multiple vocation. How do you anticipate that? Obviously, you go to the suburbs, we know it. I'm sorry, I must have escaped in my head during the conference, but indeed in the Beijing project, there are spaces that are planned to be invested differently. But it's clear that it's always an important event at the base. They also have the stadium, and it was true for Beijing for the Olympic Games, it was true for the World Cup in Munich, but it was also true for the Euro in Basel, and it's perhaps really the Euro in Bordeaux. I don't know if Bordeaux will be able to build this stadium, but it will be important for Bordeaux to conceive a stadium for the Euro, for the event, but at the same time something that is really, really good for the post-Euro. And it's good that Bordeaux has a very good football team, so a football stadium is less difficult because if a team, a city really loves football, sport, a football stadium of course has phases, but it's still something that remains important in life. Whereas an Olympic stadium, once the games are over, very often becomes a ruin. Almost all Olympic stadiums have become Olympic ruins. It's very often a pity. It was a very important beginning for us to think about what it could become, otherwise you invest a fortune for the event.

Your projects do not offer an immediate reading when you look at the building. So we talked about it; you talked about it in your first answer. There is the question of form: form is subtly troubled by augmentation, image transcended by the depth of the landscape and the urban dimension that you develop in your programmatic approach. It is not manifestly the work on form, the search for color, contrasts, that is not without link with the pictorial universe of some of your other works. You indeed maintain a relationship between art and architecture. We know your privileged, even friendly, relationship with Rémi Nogues, now deceased. Your obstinate will to act on perception, to give a feeling of space, is almost foundational to your work. There is this paradox in your work between the mastery of functionality down to the smallest detail of construction, this precision that is often called Swiss precision, this exercise of control that leaves no room for improvisation, and an extreme sensuality. You are Pierre and a bon vivant; you like football, you like wine. I remember, Jacques, when you gave this first conference at Arc en Rêve in October 1991, you said the great wines of Bordeaux. I remember, Jacques, when you gave this conference in October 1991 at Arc en Rêve, you said you dreamed of creating a perfume. Have you realized your dream?

My name is Vincent Trarieux, I am an architect. I would like to ask you a question because in fact, to return to the old conference of Rem Koolhaas in Paris, he also addressed the subject of non-city, the countryside. I wanted to know how you consider the urban event between the built element and the city, how you envisage conceiving it at the level of non-city, what I would call the countryside or in Bordeaux the suburbs. How do you envisage finding a symbol after the city? And if we take for example the idea of the stadium, how to conceive a symbol, an identity outside the walls of the city?

I think everything has been said. So I would like to thank Jacques and Pierre and Chérie and Christian Moëc for giving us the gift of this conference, two years of hard work to find this date and organize this conference today. A beautiful coincidence with the exhibition 'Insider' that we co-produced and co-realized with the CAPC. A beautiful coincidence because the work of Jacques and Pierre superbly joins the theme of the exhibition, which deals with the interrelations and interfaces between high culture and popular culture, and which crosses art and architecture. This encounter between the work of Herzog & de Meuron and the subject of 'Insider' is in their relationship to tradition, the link between craftsmanship and new technologies, and also the work of collecting and organizing materials, ornamentation, bricolage, which you talked about when you search like that for answers, solutions, when you break everything to start again on another basis. All that is at the heart of your practice. So thank you, thank you.