This formal experiment, Swiss Art Award 2013, seeks to initiate a discussion on how architects approach their commissions, if the importance is the answer to a question or more the question itself.

Memory of project

In Switzerland there is a current trend for professional tranquility and particularly so in the world of architecture where architects prefer to satisfy their commissions in studied silence. Everything is in the doing and doing as perfectly as possible. All is in how to answer properly, more than in the question itself. Open discussions on any kind of commitment are simply inexistent. Restricting the culture of architecture to the construction of buildings, however interesting and innovating the project might be, is to limit the field of their discipline. Architecture has always been about the projection of spaces, whether these might be built or just imagined. If a broader way of embracing the practice is to be admitted, their architect’s position vis-à-vis society and questions of politics could emerge in a smother way.

The emblematic figure of Claude Parent shows us the difficulties the architect faces when confronted with the power of the establishment. Designing both sculptural experiments with André Bloc, practicing ‘architectures-principe’ with Paul Virilio and the construction of nuclear power stations, the architect’s work is eponymous of the complexity of the subject.

When it comes to approaching ethically questionable commissions the interrogations not simply whether an architect is to build, or not, a prison, or whether he or she is right in accepting such a project, but rather how, through his architectural skills and tools, create a zone where debate can arise. Architecture must not shy away from the essential questions regarding institutions as powerful, violent and determining as ajail house and even more so in a period of global over-crowding.

PAROLE - Champ-Dollon 1/24 by Bureau A. Photograph © Dylan Perrenoud.

Somewhere between the area of scientific experimentation and the socio-psychological testscarried out by Stanley Milgram or Philip Zimbardo in the 1970’s, PAROLE is a proposal to open the debate of commitment in the field of architecture. Using a partial reproduction of the Geneva prison of Champ-Dollon, today known for its maximum occupancy ratios, adapted precisely to the scale of laboratory mice (1:24), PAROLE is an attempt demonstrates how architecture can seize to the question in hand.

In the tradition of sculptural architecture as defined by Michel Ragon in the sixties, formal experiments can be utilised in order to revealengagement in the face of social and political issues of any historical time. PAROLE is a symbolical object that defines itself along the borders of artculture, architectural models and a constrained living space: the cage.

The fragility of its architecture is a reflection of the precarious situation of a profession sitting uneasily between cultural and historical roots and the inevitable search for power and control, between the architect builder and the utopist one systematically refusing the system.

Text.- Bureau A.

Read more
Read less

More information

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.

Read more

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.

Read more
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.

Read more
Published on: October 14, 2013
Cite: "PAROLE - Champ-Dollon 1/24" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/parole-champ-dollon-124> ISSN 1139-6415
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...