Designing

Our designs produce a progressive sequence, whose overall effect can be described as controversial. And though the specific qualities of the design can be attributed to the object’s form, the actual design process deals with questions that reach beyond form alone: our design process seeks to establish a correlation between the building project and the city’s social cohesion. The conclusions we draw from this process establish the framework for the architecture and the urban planning for the specific project. Accordingly, the building project, or more specifically: the correlation between the building program and its place must be defined new each time. Ideally, our building project shapes our knowledge of the specific place as we engage the specific qualities of this place in developing the ideas on which we base the building program. This process culminates in ambivalent relationships: we seek to increase the appreciation of a place while at the same time changing, on occasion even overcoming the perception we have of a place. This kind of constellation has no predetermined constants or variables. The goal of finding a specific design that will engender a sense of history for a given place necessarily presupposes a dynamic design process. More to the point: there can be no right or wrong. We are borne by an experience of the city that unfolds as a manifest tapestry made up of an endless and multifaceted activity – confusing and plentiful. We cannot imagine designing by fiat, nor do we want to transform the memory imprinted in the city’s shape as in an artifact. Once a city is robbed of its history it starts to dissolve. However, our concern in this is not with the responsibilities of historic preservation. Rather, our concern is primarily with the compositional aspects of the design. We are convinced that a design for an urban plan and an architectural project cannot develop without it is firmly rooted in the depths of time, in the memory of a city. This is our continuous project: interweaving place and time to a design. This gives us the space necessary for the act of designing.

Roger Diener