Bureau A designed an obsessively repetitive library to exhibit the obsessive collection that Claude Nobs, founder and past director of the Montreux Jazz Festival, assembled during his life. It includes more than 40,000 LPs and many objects related to the music world.

Memory of project

What sort of primal impulse makes one become a collector? At what point the urge to keep becomes obsessive and occupies largely one's life?

Going through the strange, eclectic and fascinating collection of Claude Nobs, founder and past director of the Montreux Jazz Festival, the question of the fate of the objects and of the relative value of them arises vividly. One can see this "encyclopaedical" collection as an ethnographical radiography of the man. Through time he collected everything and anything obsessively. From 5 dollars objects bought on a street to paintings of recognized artists like Keith Haring. In his mountain chalet where this odd collection can be found, all these objects juxtapose chaotically, without a precise order or hierarchy. Rather, the objects seem to live at the rhythm of Claude Nobs' life, without a thoughtful agenda or plan, being removed or moved around continuously.

"Everything remembered, everything thought, all awareness becomes base, frame, pedestal, lock and key of his ownership. Period, region, craft, previous owners - all, for the true collector, merge in each one of his possessions into a magical encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object."

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

For the 2013 Montreux Jazz Festival the idea of creating a new space to expose publically part of this collection was matured and seemed a necessity in order to pay an immediate tribute to the defunct director.

A team of designers - BUREAU A - and curators - Veronica Tracchia and Mauricio Estrada Muñoz - was commissioned the urgent task to develop an exhibition project and to bring it to realization in a rather short period of time. THE COLLECTION concept emerges from the idea of a dynamic exhibition, one that can be looked at and listened to, but also on that can be manipulated continuously, accepting change with a sort of non-sacral relation to the exhibited objects.

As a rather subtle reference, the library is conceived completely in wood to recall the warm and intimate atmosphere of Nobs chalet. The structure is as obsessive as the collector's mind. Based on a unique wood beam section and assembled in a very repetitive manner, with the rigour of a minimal sculpture.

The space surrounding the library is a quiet but slightly decadent living room.

Texto.- Bureau A

CREDITS.-

Designers.- Bureau A.
Curators.- Veronica Tracchia and Mauricio Estrada Muñoz.
Venue.- Montreux Jazz Festival, Montreux, Switzerland.

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BUREAU A. Founded in 2012 by the association of Leopold Banchini and Daniel Zamarbide. Architects by training BUREAU A is a multidisciplinary platform aiming to blur the boundaries of research and project making on architectural related subjects, whichever their nature and status.

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Leopold Banchini was born in Geneva in 1981 and is an architect graduated from the EPFL (Ecole Polytechinique Fédérale de Lausanne). He is also Master in Architecture from the University of Lausanne (2007) and graduate of the Glasgow School of Art (2004).

Is a visiting professor in the HEAD (Haute Ecole de Design et) in Geneva since 2010 and Assistant Professor at the EPFL since 2009. He has also been Archozoom project designer in 2009.

Has been placed in Lot / ek Architects (New York) between the years 2004/2005, as an assistant project Art Basel (Basel) in 2005, and as a project partner of the collective Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL) that same year in Rotterdam.

He has developed his work as an architect in b720 Arquitectos (Barcelona) during the years 2007 and 2008, and Group8 Architects (Geneva) in 2009.

In addition, since 2008 part of 1to100 Architects, and architectural collective based in Geneva. Its members have been active and decisive parts in projects such as the winning participation of Bahrain at the last Venice Biennale - RECLAIM Golden Lion 2011, exhibitions such as The Gulf - OMA-AMO's participation at the Venice Biennale 2007 and publications such as AMO-Rem Koolhaas's Al Manakh. Parallel to that, they conduce many different operations ranging from architecture, to journalism, until urban design. They have teaching positions at the EPFL and the University of Arts and Design in Geneva.

Its aim is to take position and initiate reflexions upon our contemporary environment.

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BUREAU, is the new project by Daniel Zamarbide. The practice hides under its generic name a variety of research activities. BUREAU makes things as an urge to react to the surrounding physical, cultural and social environment with a critical standpoint and with an immersive attitude. BUREAU is (in 2017) a furniture series, an editorial project, a design team, they are architects.

Daniel Zamarbide obtains his master degree at the Institut d’Architecture de l’Université de Genève (IAUG) in 1999. During his studies he followed the workshops of Christian Marclay, Philippe Parreno and Catherine Queloz at the École Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Geneva.

In the year 2000 he becomes one of the founding members of group8, an architectural practice that has acquired an important national and international recognition.


Daniel Zamarbide has developed through the years a particular interest in the protean aspects of his discipline and nourishes his work and research through other domains like philosophy, applied and visual arts as well as cinema.

As a guest lecturer and jury he has been invited at a diversity of international schools and institutions to present and discuss his work and research.

Since 2003 his interest in research and education has led him to be invited as an assistant in the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and as a professor (2000-14) at the Haute École d’Art et de Design (HEAD) in Geneva. In 2014, he integrates the team of ALICE Lab (Dieter Dietz) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) as a guest professor and research director.

In 2012, Daniel leaves group8 to start a new practice with Leopold Banchini, architect. Their practice, BUREAU A has explored during 5 years the possibilities of architectural making in a great variety of formats, opening the practice to work in the fields of art, garden and landscape architecture, exhibition design, temporary architecture and object making.

In 2017, following the dissolution of BUREAU A, Daniel Zamarbide pursues his more personal research interests under the name of BUREAU. This new entity produces architecture in the continuity of BUREAU A and incorporates to his already prolific activities furniture design (with a design brand of the same name) and an editorial project, which launches the first publication in June 2017.

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