Christ & Gantenbein

120 pages, Spanish/English

Emanuel Christ and Christoph Gantenbein set up their own office in Basel in 1998, right upon completing their studies at ETH Zürich, and barely a year later they had already carried the day in one of the most important competitions in the country. However, this quick start has not prevented them from building a reflective and rigorous practice, based on the study of past types and on the understanding of contexts, be they historical or physical. In the past twenty-five years they have developed more than two hundred projects, a noteworthy achievement that AV’s new monograph synthesizes in a chronological tour of their key works, from the initiatory extension of the Swiss National Museum to the recent proposals for museums of contemporary art in Barcelona and Antwerp. To introduce the itinerary, an essay by the professor and critic Reto Geiser gives due account of the intellectual intensity and geometric perseverence that defines any of their projects, whatever their scale, function or material.