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Note: Scuola La Monda school house
Raphael Zuber's innovative school building in Grono, Switzerland is a lesson in what creative practices can achieve in a conducive industry culture, says Samuel Penn
The schoolhouse in the Swiss village of Grono, the first completed building by the architect Raphael Zuber, based in nearby Chur, is thought-provoking. This is not just because of its design but because it provides an opportunity to reflect on the differences in procurement culture between the UK and Switzerland.
Cursory investigation highlights the most basic difference: Zuber, aged 38, with one assistant, not only has the opportunity to compete for significant public works due to an unfettered competition process, but is positively encouraged to do so by the Swiss architectural discipline's strong culture of stewardship.
You don't have to travel far in Britain to notice that we have a problem architecturally. Although there have been initiatives to improve the production of important public buildings they have been few and are on the wane. Designs only tend to achieve the level of architectural ambition set by the ubiquitous risk-management procedures of local authorities. Public/private investment programmes, although once innovative, are now commercial vehicles in which the architecture, the most visible and obviously important embodiment of the initiative, has become secondary.
In Switzerland, most architects still acquire their work through competition. For the past 130 years the Swiss Society of Engineers & Architects (SIA), supported by the Association of Swiss Architects (BSA), has endeavoured to build a solid foundation for the advancement and coordination of competitions. In 2008 the BSA held a centenary exhibition in the central station court in Zurich, including 300 plaster site models with a huge plaque that simply read: "The architecture competition is good for culture" - a sentiment that warms the heart! Zuber's school is one of hundreds of schemes competed for and won by young architects in Switzerland every year because larger offices tend not to indulge modest competitions.
This provides a type of public commission that naturally disposes itself to emerging talent. The competition for Grono's Scuola La Monda was organised using the SIA standard format....