Duplex Architects: Rethinking Housing

Duplex Architects exemplify innovative housing design in Switzerland and what it can contribute to urban development.

Duplex Architects was founded in 2007 in Zurich and now also run offices in Düsseldorf, Hamburg, and, most recently, in Paris. They have gained an excellent reputation internationally for their designs of various scales and across a vast range of typologies.

This first monograph on Duplex Architects’ work offers a close look at their approach to housing design. Five projects in Switzerland are documented extensively through a wealth of images, plans, and visualizations, exemplifying the firm’s position on urban planning, typology research, and materiality and demonstrating their utterly independent way of working. Urban scale, search for new forms of communal living, the importance of community, and a collaborative design process are at the core of Duplex Architects’ explorations into residential architecture.

Nele Dechmann’s text and Ludovic Balland’s photo essay serve to illuminate Duplex Architects’ work each in their own way. Further texts are contributed by the firm’s founding partners Anne Kaestle and Dan Schürch, as well as by other expert authors, who cast their own personal glance at the five projects featured in this book.

Ludovic Balland is a Basel-based graphic designer, editor, and creative developer.

Nele Dechmann is a Zurich-based freelance architect. Her focus as practicing architect and theorist is on new forms of housing. She also works as a writer and curator at the interface of art and architecture.