Annette Gigon Knihy

Since their earlier acclaim the architectural approach of Annette Gigon and Mike Guyer has been further consolidated through a number of thought-provoking and balanced projects. Their vision is exemplified by such works as the Museum of Transport, Luzern, which graces the front cover of this issue, alongside designs for the art-depot for Gallery Henze & Ketterer, the Löwenbräu Arts Centre with accompanying residential tower and offices, and their celebrated Single Family House in the Canton of Graubünden. In this volume El Croquis examines a total of 20 projects produced between 2001 to 2008 through extensive illustrations containing full-page colour photographs, technical drawings and models. An essay exploring the context and development of their practice, bibliographic information, and an interview between the architects and Hubertus Adams and Stanislaus von Moos are also included.

Zurich-based architect couple Annette Gigon and Mike Guyer are known for creating spaces that inspire and allow for intense contemplation. In the spirit of the duo's previous work--the Kirchner Museum at Davos, the renovation of the Winterthur art museum, and the extension of the Winterthur's Oskar Reinhart collection--their new museum project at Appenzell also exhibits a powerful, idiosyncratic sense of aesthetics. The Liner Museum, dedicated to the Appenzell painters Carl August and Carl Walter Liner--father and son, respectively--presents itself as a sculptural the very antithesis of prescriptive postmodern museum architecture that threatens to draw attention away from the exhibits, Gigon and Guyer's edifice displays the imperatives of clear stereometrics and neutral spaces. Here, the architects have succeeded in integrating the new structure into its rural surroundings and vice versa. This book features the Liner Museum, completed in 1998, in a photographic sequence by the gifted architectural photographer Gaston Wicky.