ETH Zurich Professor emeritus Miroslav Šik receives the Prix Meret Oppenheim 2025
At the ETH Zurich in the 1980s, the architect developed the consequential movement of "Analogue Architecture". Over almost 20 years lecturing at the ETH, Šik influenced a further generation of architects.
The Federal Office of Culture is awarding the Prix Meret Oppenheim to outstanding Swiss art practitioners for the 25th time since it was founded in 2001. At the recommendation of the Federal Art Commission, the prizes for the 2025 edition will go to the art caster Felix Lehner, the artist Pamela Rosenkranz and the architect and ETH Zurich Professor emeritus Miroslav Šik. Together with the winners of the Swiss Art Awards, the prizewinners will be honoured on June 16 in Basel.
"At the ETH in Zurich in the 1980s, Miroslav Šik (b. 1953 in Prague) developed a consequential movement with the catchy yet combative label "Analogue Architecture" which was to influence Swiss architecture and some of its leading practitioners for years to come", the jury writes. It espoused a deliberate rejection of classical modernism, but was also a counter-movement to the intellectual and often ironic postmodern.
After his academic commitment at the ETH, the architect realized his first buildings and conversions in the early 1990s, which attracted a great deal of attention. Šik taught in Prague and at the EPFL in Lausanne. In the early 2000s, he returned to the ETH in Zurich as a full professor. "He taught a practically oriented and conciliatory architectural language that blended regionalism, traditionalism, and modernism and was dubbed old-new architecture", says the jury. Over almost 20 years lecturing on the subject at the ETH, Šik influenced a further generation of architects.
Alongside his teaching work, Šik put his ideas of an old-new reformist architecture into practice, designing numerous residential buildings, retirement homes, educational institutions and ecclesiastical constructions. He has been a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague since 2018. A book on his teachings, "Analoge Altneue Architektur", was published in 2018. Šik was honoured with the Heinrich Tessenow Medal in 2005. He received the State Award from the Czech Ministry of Culture in 2024.