Duplex Architects

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

Duplex Architects were 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 in Germany and Switzerland offers a close look at their approach to housing design. Five projects in Switzerland are documented extensively through a wealth of images, plans, and visualisations, 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.

500 colour, 20 b/w illustrations

About the Authors

Ludovic Balland lives and works in Basel as a graphic designer specialising in entire editorial projects, and also teaches as a professor of typography at HGB Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig and lectures at various art schools and universities in Switzerland, Europe, and the US.

Nele Dechmann is a Zurich-based freelance architect and theorist with a focus on new forms of housing.