Finding Buildings: Chalk-Drawings by Marianne Burkhalter

Description

Burkhalter Sumi Architects were founded in Zurich in 1984. Their list of realised projects for public and private clients includes a wide range of tasks: workspaces, hotels and housing structures, urban development master-plannings and conversions of disused industrial buildings. The office has gained particular recognition for their state-of-the-art timber constructions. The first stage of the architect's design process is drawing by hand. It is a truly creative process driven by thinking in variations. Marianne Burkhalter's chalk-drawings are fine examples for research that is carried-out simultaneously at various levels of differing importance: approaching the task, exploring potentials of a program as well as its problems and searching for forms, layouts and shapes. Other than the technical drawing, the chalk-drawing is ambiguous, even paradoxical, concise and blurred, determined and undecided all at the same time. This exploration of the field of tension of 'sense and sensibility' becomes fascinatingly traceable in Marianne Burkhalter's drawings. "Burkhalter Sumi Architects. Finding Buildings" presents drawings for twenty projects, built and unrealised, from the past ten years. This title includes a text in English and German.

Marianne Burkhalter worked as an architect in various offices in Switzerland, Italy and the US before establishing her own office together with Christian Sumi in 1984. She has been a professor at the Academia die Architettura of the Universita della Svizzera Italiana in Mendrisio (Switzerland) since 2007. Christian Sumi worked at the German Archaeological Institute in Rome from 1978 to 1981 and as a research fellow at the Institute for History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich from 1980 to 1983 before establishing his own office together with Marianne Burkhalter in 1984. He has been a professor at the Academia die Architettura of the Universita della Svizzera Italiana in Mendrisio (Switzerland) since 2007.