a+u #639 – Edelaar Mosayebi Inderbitzin Architekt*innen

This issue of a+u features the Swiss architecture firm Edelaar Mosayebi Inderbitzin Architekt*innen (EMI), founded in 2005 by architects Ron Edelaar, Elli Mosayebi, and Christian Inderbitzin. Working primarily in Switzerland, their works include exhibitions, refurbishments, building projects, and urban planning. However, housing is the firm’s dominant architectural preoccupation, as they examine and reinterpret the small-scale components that contribute to human agency and delight within a dwelling. As EMI says, they have “developed a veritable obsession with doors.” EMI are storytellers, using subtle gestures – a turn of a wall, the absence of a lintel – to expand upon the purely functional perception of everyday architectural elements. Moving away from the neutral container, EMI embeds rational design choices with notions of poetry, as evident in the 21 projects presented here. Oscillating between the 2 metaphors of ruins and machines, the projects described on the coming pages move through concepts of gardens and landscapes, villas and high-rises. The issue begins and ends with installations: the first challenges the notion of inside versus outside, while the last comments on the capabilities of architecture in the Anthropocene. In between, projects question codes taken as the norm in architecture, from Stockmattstrasse Townhouses, which introduced an unconventional construction method, to Performative House, which rethinks fixed architectural relationships by enabling walls, lamps, and cabinets to pivot.