School Crisser

School Vevey is a design for an elementary school in Crissier, a small village in the Swiss Romandie. The design includes eight class rooms, a sports hall and related administrative spaces.

The program demands a relatively large building set within the core of the village consisting of smaller scale pitched-roof houses. To mediate the scale difference between school and neighboring buildings the shape of the roof is folded twice. The internal organization wraps classrooms and sport hall around a semi-open circulation system. The building is made of a modern timber construction.

Authors: Aurel von Richthofen
with Alessia Pegorin, Magdalena Kupfersberger, Thomas Hurrell and Riccardo del Fabbro

Place: Crissier, Switzerland
Year: 2012
Size: 1600 m2
Type: Competition
Client: Commune de Crissier

Crissier School - long section perspective

Crissier School - short section perspective

School Vevey

School Vevey is a design for an secondary school in the town of Vevey on the shore of lake Geneva including three sport halls, student restaurant, library, auditorium and 70 class rooms.

Sucre Glace

Sucre-glace is an compact ice-rink and sports stadium in the Swiss village of St.Cergues, located in the Jura mountains close to Geneva. The envelope is a consists of an inflated membrane and wooden space-frame.

Elephant Park

Elephant Park is a design for an elephant house with inner and outer spaces as extension to the Zurich zoo. The design maximizes visitor experiences though undulating layout in the landscape. The Elephant Park negotiates a series of programmatic constraints based on the nature of designing for elephants and humans alike, moving away from the classic separation of exhibit and observer.

Nouvelle Comédie

Nouvelle Comédie is a competition design for a new classic and contemporary theater and opera house in Geneva, Switzerland. Nouvelle Comédie is a hybrid. For the sake of programmatic flexibility all main spaces are organized on one horizontal plane. Acoustic requirements on stage and seating given, constrained by the site, the resulting form is a simple massing diagram. Thus the section resembles Antoine de St. Exuperie’s hat-turned-elephant-eating-snake drawing from the Little Prince. The architectural exploration is bound to the thin layer of the facade. The skin necessarily becomes the mediating surface of this project.

Warsaw Rotunda

Warsaw Rotunda is a renovation and a tactical urban space project at once. The design takes an existing building, strips its facade and turns its inner space into an observation platform. The reversal of a closed hermetic space into an open public lantern reclaims a central place in Warsaw for the public.