Adrien Comte and Adrien Meuwly appointed Associate Professors of Architecture and Construction

Their office in Zurich-Schwamendingen used to be in a car factory from the 1950ies, that was extended in the 1970ies and eventually teared down in 2024. “The brutality of the demolition influenced our work a lot”, Adrien Comte explains. “We experienced some absurdities of the market in Switzerland very directly”. In the beginning, the architects designed small-scale transformations and extensions. They were asking: What qualities exist? What should we keep? What needs to be improved?

Recently, they have won several competitions for bigger projects that involve city planning and landscape architecture. In Renens, the architects transform a mixed-use public campus. Four buildings will be adapted, two new ones will be added, with a many re-use elements, even the primary structure. By concentrating the sports facilities on the new roofs, they free up the ground and turn the campus into a public park.

In Basel-Land Comte/Meuwly are transforming the school and sports campus of Therwil, a competition they won in 2024. A dozen buildings will be adapted and extended. “We work exclusively in the existing, by transforming and extending, without covering new ground”, Adrien Meuwly says. The river that was channelled in the past will be opened again. Here too, the idea is of the campus as a public park.

In Paris the architects, in collaboration with the practice Bruther, are planning a social housing project with more than 100 apartments. In the design they use and test many different bio-based materials, from wood to hemp, in order to reduce the CO2 footprint of the construction. The commission is a pilot project for the new building code in Paris that will heavily focus on sustainable materials. “The building is conceived as a very hybrid construction, an assemblage of many different materials which are all used for their best performance”, Adrien Meuwly explains.

The large scale the office is lately working in, is not that different from their early transformation projects, the two explain. “All of our projects are coming from a deep understanding of what is existing, of available potentials, at all scales”, says Adrien Comte. Small or large scale, 1:10.000 or 1:1: Their method of working is the same. “We constantly question what is given and try to find the most specific way to assemble things together.” Next to the urban scale, the two architects continue to work in a smaller and more rural context, always focusing on transformation. In the Swiss countryside, they are converting several barns, finding strategies to preserve and enhance the existing potentials.

Collaboration across boundaries

Comte/Meuwly often collaborate with other architecture offices. In Paris, for example, they work together with the office of ETH Zurich Professor Alexandre Theriot. The interdisciplinarity is also an important part of their approach. They want to push the boundaries between architecture and landscape architecture, combining the two disciplines early on in planning.

Before coming back to ETH Zurich as professors, the architects led a guest studio at École nationale supérieur d’architecture Versailles and have led several workshops at HEAD Geneva. The two also organized workshops in Belgium, Ukraine or Denmark where they transformed existing locations with performative actions and constructions. “This was a way to approach a place, to understand the different contexts and to change the meaning of a space with minimal means", Adrien Meuwly explains. “Also, it is important for us to do a lot of hands-on construction, and to learn by building ourselves.”