Swiss roll

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 1997 by Steven Spier

The growing acceptance of a new simplicity under which to gather current work from German-speaking Switzerland is of course itself too simplistic. Two projects from Burkhalter & Sumi in Zurich, an addition to the Hotel Zurichberg and a small commercial school in Laufenberg, reveal a complexity behind their seemingly straightforward buildings that is tempered through the firm's research into wood construction(1) and tectonics. The buildings are non-emphatic though rigorous and bespeak a humility in the art of architecture.

In their late '40s and practising together in Zurich since 1984, Marianne Burkhalter and Christian Sumi have dissimilar backgrounds which conjoin fortuitously. She trained in the drawing office before working abroad in the 1970s for avant-garde firms Superstudio in Florence and Studioworks in New York and Los Angeles. Sumi is more academically trained. After graduating from the ETH in Zurich, he worked with Bruno Reichlin at the University of Geneva and at the Institute for History and Theory at the ETH. They have recently held visiting professorships at Sci-ARC and Harvard respectively.

A breakthrough in the design for the hotel addition came after the architects finally understood the client's priority, which was to add 72 parking spaces but only 30 rooms to the hotel's original 37. The site required that the addition's massing be compact, and the idea developed of an underground spiral in a clearing on the west side of the hotel that would rise through the forest floor. The centre of this pavilion, which in the multi-level car park is solid, a technical room, metamorphosises into a void above and becomes a third element, fastening together the parking - the hidden two thirds of the building's volume, and the rooms.

Circular forms - drums, spirals, domes - are historically, typologically and programmatically heroic, but here the architects subvert this certitude. First, the form is not idealised but eccentric - an oval, and twists through the forest floor not dervish-like but stoically. Its centre is circular but unoccupiable and vestigial, scooped out to leave behind a primeval piece of the forest outside. One is not allowed to perceive the space from its privileged point. The skylit underground entry corridor joining the new and old buildings is curved, thereby obscuring the complexities of the space until one enters it.

The section too refutes one's expectations of a climax: the light blue flat ceiling, a lid against which the void pushes calmly, teasingly draws one upwards towards windows which are too high to see out of; the ramp itself literally fades into the wall. The doors seem uncomfortably close to one another but the rooms broaden towards the outside and are thus surprisingly spacious. The shape allows the bathrooms, exceptionally in hotels, to have natural light and ventilation. The furniture, designed by the architects, is movable and reflects the nomadic nature of hotel living.

The tension between the directional nature of an oval, reinforced by the linear skylight with the band windows at the top, and the centralised nature of the circular void, is heightened by colour. The void side and the top of the ramp's parapet, which is structural, are white to define the ideal space. The other side of the parapet, however, is the red of the wall which it faces, so enclosing the odd-shaped and generous circulation space and relating the walls to the red exterior. But the skin refuses to refer to the building's construction, which as in most cases today is a hybrid: the floor and roof are in-situ concrete while the walls are brick.

The horizontally laid red pine exterior emphasises the prone character of the building while the staggered bathroom windows, with their siding twisted at an angle, suggest the vertiginous space within. The taut exterior surface can fold back at the balconies to reveal the building's depth. During the day these shutters allow in a beautiful filtered light; at night the building glows and radiates mystery, as a hotel should.

The exterior colours connect the addition and the original building, built at the turn of the century of pale yellow brick with rust-red quoins and arches, while their different materials and forms let each stand alone. In a gentle irony the entrances to the hotel, on the south side, and the garage, cut into the north side retaining wall, are centred on one another. The old hotel, which the architects renovated, retains its pre-eminence and satisfies the client's need for separation between overnight visitors and people stopping for rests on their walks. Furthermore, the addition avoids the original building's clear distinction between lakeside and wood-edge, acknowledging the importance of the latter and lessening the price differential that a two-sided solution would have created.

1 Burkhalter, Marianne & Christian Sumi, The Timber Buildings (Zurich: gta exhibitions), 1996. This is the catalogue of an exhibition which is travelling throughout Europe. See also Sumi's essay, 'Building the Wooden House Today', in the reprint of Wachsmann, Konrad, Building the Wooden House: Technique and Design (Boston; Berlin: Birkhauser), 1995.