LEOPOLD BANCHINI

‘I believe in a non-commercial, collaborative and free spirit.’

Photo: Dylan Perrenoud

The Swiss architect Leopold Banchini admires the inexhaustible creativity of non-professionals, and sees building together with others as a way to constitute a community. There is a touch of utopia in his projects, a temporary utopia.

CASA CCFF, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND PHOTO: DYLAN PERRENOUD

A barn-like house on poles, with a slender structure next to a railway in Geneva, referring to industrial architecture of the surroundings with a sawtooth roof of corrugated metal; a workshop for weaving textile in Bahrain, made with locally available materials and with walls and a roof of dried date palm leaves, woven to provide a strong surface; a roof of silver reflective heat screen that covers a roundabout, also in Bahrain, creating a huge public space where people can meet and discuss the exhibited outcome of an open competition about the future of the square; a temporary pavilion for a dance party in Belgium, constructed with repurposed materials and built by students in one week. Projects may differ a lot, but they all have an elegant lightness and an air of temporality in common, as though they are just passers-by who could disappear at any moment.

“My architectural practice is definitely not what you expect from a Swiss architect,” explains Leopold Banchini at the library of a record company in Geneva, for which he designed the interior. “Although I admire the long and beautiful tradition of Swiss architecture, I consciously try to distance myself as far from it as possible. That is at all levels: the type of projects, the type of clients, the location of the projects and also the economic model of my office. Swiss architecture is basically a financial model.

It works because you have clients with a certain wealth, you have projects with a certain budget and you can have an office of a certain size. All these things are related. I try to operate in a completely different way. I don’t really have an office, making me more mobile. I have projects all around the world and I work with budgets that are much smaller than the usual Swiss allocations. It is not that I want to distance myself completely from the way architecture in Switzerland is done, but I am critical of the way the system works. I consider it my duty to include that political attitude in my practice.”

You could also choose to go with the flow because it would provide more opportunities to do architecture, wouldn’t it? Rem Koolhaas once compared the architect to the surfer on the waves, waves as the financial and political forces that determine the demand for architecture.

“When I was a student, Rem Koolhaas was one of my inspirations. But after the financial crisis, this model of the surfer on the waves wasn’t ethically and ecologically viable any more. I think we need to do things differently. The world is evolving, and so are our positions as architects. At the same time I have to say that I am still fascinated by Rem’s work, the open, unbiased way he uses materials, his analyses of spaces that are not looked at before.

Both of these aspects of his architecture remain very relevant for my own architecture. Like him, but in my own way, I am fascinated by the completely unexpected things happen to what we usually take for granted. In a neighbourhood that is built by non-architects with the most banal materials, you can find an incredible creativity that is completely outside of what any architect would think of. For example, if you look at the self-built neighbourhoods in Lisbon – I refer to this because I have studied these projects with students – they may look banal, built with very cheap or found materials and standardized systems. At the same time they are put together in ways that are completely unexpected. That is where, for me, the poetry comes in. Non-architects don’t necessarily have the preconceived ideas that architects have.”

Most architects strive for a sophisticated aesthetic. Your approach seems to be more modest. What is your aim when you design a building, a space?

“For me it is important to develop spaces that are not stereotypical, but a direct response to what the person who is going to use them actually needs. At the same time these spaces shouldn’t be directive. They should simply be the support of actions that will happen there, a stage for the life developing in them. Maybe that is what distinguishes me from an artist: I never think the work itself as a goal. I make tools for people to use, not objects to look at.”

AL NASEEJ TEXTILE FACTORY, BANI JAMRAH, BAHRAIN PHOTO: MICHIEL DE CLEEN

CASA CCFF, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND PHOTO: DYLAN PERRENOUD

You are often also personally involved in the building process, and you work together with the builders. Why don’t you stick to designing?

“First of all, I really enjoy building. If I spend too much time at the computer I feel like I am going crazy. Also, I am touched by architecture when the way it is built makes sense and is not wasteful, absurd or disrespectful to the builders. Sometimes I see buildings that must have been painful to build; in other cases I am sensitive to the beauty or even a choreography of how it was built. For me, architecture is about understanding the movements of the workers, their gestures, and starting the creative process by thinking about those gestures. Architects usually draw concrete walls and slabs, often prefabricated and very heavy, and they tend to forget that building is a physical act. But if you understand that, you don’t just design a shape and then wonder what the structure behind it should be, and then ask the engineer to solve it. You start by thinking about how materials are going to be brought to the site and how they are going to be assembled. And in my personal experience the best way to understand that is to be part of the construction process, to be involved in it myself. I will never have the skills of a professional builder, of course, but participating in the building process is extremely helpful in the design. So now, even when I am in front of my computer screen, every line that I draw comes from a thought about the building process.”

Is that a political stance too?

“Yes. Apart from the pleasure, there is a political and an economic aspect to your own construction work. I really like the idea that people are able to build houses, offices, huts and temporary structures for parties, in a non-professional way. It is important to me that people can have agency on the space in which they live without being completely dependent on professionals. But I also believe in specialization. I believe that architects have a certain understanding of space that non-professionals don’t have. The same goes for builders. It is simply about designing your own environment and making it a less financially complex process. As a young person, I experienced an alternative world of squatting. That was the way to go then. If you squatted a building you had to repair it yourself, build your own room, and decide what the room should look like. That attitude is what I am still really interested in, and I try to maintain the way I do architecture, that non-commercial, collaborative and free spirit.”

How do you realize building that is cheap, non-commercial and without bank financing?

“It’s not easy, of course, especially because building regulations in Switzerland are very restrictive. These standards are made with good intentions, drawn up for ecological reasons and to extend the life of buildings, but they make building very expensive.

BAB AL BAHRAIN PAVILION, WITH NOURA AL SAYEH, MANAMA, BAHRAIN PHOTOS: EMAN ALI

As a result, building your own house has become largely inaccessible to the majority of people. That is why, in my projects, I try to question these norms. Some of them make sense, but I don’t think, for example, that architecture has to last forever. After fifty years, many buildings here in Geneva will be destroyed anyway because of the of the market pressure; or they will need to be rebuilt or redone because building norms have changed. In my opinion, this is the most wasteful way we can build. I am not saying it should never be done like this. But the urban fabric is constantly changing and we should be able to think of an architecture that is less wasteful, and not necessarily meant to last forever. That is why there is also a need to build a lighter, more temporary architecture. I have always looked with admiration at contemporary Japanese architecture. Some areas there are similar to Switzerland. They have a cold winter and a warm summer, but they have accepted that houses can be built with a shorter lifespan. That has really liberated single-family architecture in Japan. After all, when you look at the history of architecture, of non-pedigree architecture, it was often built in a temporary way but in an ecological, not in a wasteful way.”

In your architecture, you are always seeking how to contribute as much as possible but with minimal means. One way of doing that is to use cheap materials or to reuse materials that are at hand – for instance like old electricity posts and the turpentine timber of an old jetty in the Marramarra Shack in Australia. The result is that you use a lot of different materials, so much so that your work could be described as bricolage. What appeals to you about bricolage?

“Working with local materials or with whatever is available is ecological in terms of sourcing, but also more appropriate to the local climate. It is more sustainable in the long run. But I prefer to see it as an intuitive aspect, as assembling materials at hand for self-built new worlds. I always try to keep that playfulness in my architecture. The culture of my generation comes from the ‘banlieues’ and is critical of them. So I could never see myself as an architect building a suburb. For me, bricolage can be seen as the antithesis of the standardized modernist block. It also means that I treat all materials with equal care. In my view there is no hierarchy of materials.”

CASA MARRAMARRA, MARRAMARRA CREEK, AUSTRALIA

PHOTOS: LEOPOLD BANCHINI

Another way of creating spaces with minimal means is through non-architectural interventions, such as in Bahrein, where you supposed to stop the traffic and show an exhibition in the middle of a roundabout. Is space in your opinion not intrinsically linked to architectural means?

“Yes, that is clear to me. At the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam I wanted to explore the question with the students: how do we influence space beyond architecture? The experience of space can also be created by a sound system, for instance, or by a party or a tree. I found it really fascinating to delve into that. It was probably through this studio that I realized how the most dramatic spatial changes, the most important ones that moved me the most, were often made with non-architectural means by non-professionals. Even today, the spaces that impress me most have nothing to do with architectural design. At the same time, of course, I believe that architecture can have an influence on space. Architecture can have something to say, even if it’s not always about big buildings.”

MOON RA, HORST FESTIVAL, BELGIUM

PHOTO: MAXIME DELVAUX

For the Horst Festival in Belgium, you helped build a pavilion for a dance party with architecture students. Was it your aim to create a community by building together with others?

“Absolutely. Building together is joyful and creates a community. One example that I had in mind is the concept of barn-raising in the Amish community. This means that the community comes together to build a new barn. They cook together, they eat together, and then they build huge barns at huge speed. So they have the power of community and enjoyment during a weekend building, something that would otherwise cost millions and take months to build by a professional company. It doesn’t mean there’s no specialization. Some people in the Amish community are good at nailing, others are good at preparing the wood, and someone else has done the plans beforehand. Being able to build like that as a community requires planning. It also requires architectural skills to make plans and to prepare and number the pieces. But it is still a communal art that I find very beautiful.

“The Horst event was the happiest moment for me when I saw people celebrating the space and celebrating life in the space by having a party and dancing all night. The idea is to create temporary moments of autonomous anarchy, moments of freedom in our lives. There is no hierarchy, no controlling power, no monetary exchange; it is people coming together, where things are fine, a tiny, temporary utopia. I really believe that we need to bring in this notion of utopia. We have to dream big, and rethink the way our society is organized, our production system. In my small architectural practice, I like to bring in utopian ideas and at the same time question the way we live.”

MOON RA, HORST FESTIVAL, BELGIUM PHOTO: MAXIME DELVAUX