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Architecture

Architecture in Zürich

Zurich builds carefully and expensively, and its recent architecture is dominated by a handful of Swiss offices working at very high precision. The city gives them small sites and long timescales.

• Kunsthaus Zürich extension

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  Completed 2021

  David Chipperfield

  An extension to the art museum, standing across the square from the original. David Chipperfield built a limestone block matching the height of its neighbours, with vertical fins that turn the elevation into a screen rather than a wall. The galleries inside are plain top-lit rooms arranged around a central hall. The building makes no gesture toward the square, which is the position it was designed to take.

• Landesmuseum extension

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  Completed 2016

  Christ & Gantenbein

  An addition to the national museum behind the main station. Christ & Gantenbein poured it in board-marked concrete and folded the volume so it bridges a passage and closes the courtyard the old castle-like building had left open. Windows are cut as irregular openings that align with nothing. The same material runs inside and out, which is why the addition reads as one carved mass.

• Tamedia office building

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  Completed 2013

  Shigeru Ban

  An office building for a media company beside the Sihl. Shigeru Ban built the entire seven storey frame in spruce, using shaped joints that lock together with no metal fastener anywhere in the structure. The frame stands exposed behind a glass envelope, so the structure is also the interior. It demonstrated that timber could carry a commercial building of this size in a city centre.

• Prime Tower

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  Completed 2011

  Gigon/Guyer

  An office tower on a former industrial site in Zurich West. Gigon/Guyer shaped the plan as an irregular polygon so the tower reads differently from each approach, and clad it in green tinted glass. The tint was chosen so the mass changes with the weather instead of holding one colour. It is the building that turned a district of workshops into an office quarter.

• Pavillon Le Corbusier

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  Completed 1967

  Le Corbusier

  An exhibition pavilion on the lake shore, commissioned by the gallerist Heidi Weber. Le Corbusier built it entirely in steel and glass with enamelled panels in colour, which is the opposite of the concrete his work is known for. A free-standing steel roof floats above the whole thing, structurally separate from the box beneath it. He died two years before it was finished, and it is the last building he designed.