Journal of Architectural Education

ISSN: 1046-4883 (Print) 1531-314X (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rjae20

Interview with Miroslav Šik

Martin Bressani

To cite this article: Martin Bressani (2019) Interview with Miroslav Šik, Journal of Architectural
Education, 73:1, 77-82, DOI: 10.1080/10464883.2019.1560802
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10464883.2019.1560802

Published online: 28 Mar 2019.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 329

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjae20
 Interview with Miroslav Šik
Martin Bressani: You have been and
are still one of the architects and
educators most closely associated
with the concept of atmosphere as
a design method. Can you tell us the
story of how you became interested
in that idea, and how it was used
by yourself and others at the ETH
in Zurich in the last three or four
decades? I’d like to talk about this
word as a concept, and about other
concepts that may have clustered
around it. . . . Alongside the word
atmosphere, you have used the word
analogue to designate your own
school of thought. You’ve developed
the concept in your own way, but it
first came out of the typological, mor-
phological method of Rossi.
Šik: Of course, everything is rooted
in Aldo Rossi’s view of architecture.
Bressani: But he, himself, never used
the word atmosphere.
Šik: No, it was forbidden.
Bressani: It was forbidden?
Šik: Forbidden, yes. His key concept
was analogy, which meant similia
similibus, following the medieval
notion that everything is connected
to everything. It had a bit of a
religious connotation: all forms are
related through an original design
will. Rossi could therefore see an
analogy between a house and the
skeleton of a fish, for example. I
never understood that concept until
he became my teacher in 1977.
Bressani: That is when he came to
teach at the ETH Zurich.
Bressani
Martin Bressani
McGill University
Šik: He came twice. First in 1972–74
and 1977–78. But I didn’t get to
meet him the first time. That was
when Jacques Herzog, Roger Diener,
and Pierre de Meuron were his
students. It was the “classical” Rossi,
with 400-meter-long buildings,
regular windows across, such as
the Gallaratese housing in Milan. It
was a mixture of general forms with
Italian Razionalismo of the 1930s.
When he came back to Zurich in
1977, he was radically changed. He
had just returned from the United
States, bringing back, amongst
other things, a Mickey Mouse
watch and very-thin yellow tracing
paper, and he started to paint with
colors. In the first sketches he did
for us, there is blue sky and colors,
in layers. Suddenly they are big
collages of colorful things, drawn
from industrial architecture, a
little bit from Italy, and also from
local architecture. Rossi always
used collage, it was nothing new,
but suddenly the contrast between
forms was much more striking. In
the older days, he used only black
and white, producing very serious
and even melancholic drawings, but
now suddenly he was funny, even
ironic. Wearing his Mickey Mouse
watch, he almost wanted us to go
eat hamburgers at the McDonald’s
that had just opened in Zurich. For
us Italophiles who only ate spaghetti
and drank vino rosso, it was a shock.
He appeared to us as an agent of
Robert Venturi. In Zurich, Venturi
was out of fashion. Or, I should say,
never was in fashion; it was a little
bit too much for us. Learning from Las
Vegas was never understood, partly
because here in Zurich in 1977 there
were not so many Americanisms as
JAE 73 : 1
there are today. And also America,
politically, was seen negatively.
Rossi, when he came back, made us
question this perception.
Bressani: How was Rossi as a studio
teacher?
Šik: In 1977–78 he stayed only
two semesters, and in fact he was
almost never here because he was
becoming world famous. He could
never concentrate on anything. He
would just fly in and fly out. We
were working a little bit on our own.
Fabio Reinhart and Bruno Reichlin
wanted him back so that he could
become a professor at the ETH,
but the majority of the professors
didn’t want that, so he never
came back after 1978.
Bressani: Was Rossi using the con-
cept of analogy in that period?
Šik: Città analoga was his word.
He probably never used it as a
concept for designing buildings,
but the expression città analoga was
current. That is how I first became
acquainted with the idea of analogue.
The funny thing is that we, as a
class, didn’t really want to make
Rossi-style designs. We preferred
to work with other references. In
1972–74, Rossi’s classes were all
about analysis; you made a careful
typological plan of a town, and
studied its history. But in the end,
everyone always designed Rossi-style
buildings. They all looked a little bit
the same ... primary elements. We
had done that sort of work in Mario
Campi’s class the year before Rossi
came back in 1977. Campi continued
this method in part because there
77
Figure 1. Miroslav Šik, with the collaboration of
Eva Maria Riepling, Martin Bühler, Andreas Hild.
Competition entry for a building complex, Selnau II,
Zurich, 1986.
were diploma students of Rossi’s,
like Eraldo Consolascio and Fabio
Reinhart, who were his assistants.
All our projects in Campi’s studio
were Rossiana. We had to design
a university for Lugano, so, for
about two months, we analyzed
medieval or seventeenth-century
universities, and then, in the last
three weeks, made our designs. Our
projects were all 400 meters long,
because universities after all should
stretch out like long agoras. All the
drawings were black and white—
white buildings with hundreds of
dark windows in front of a stormy
sky. At the end of the semester some
people, probably in Livio Vacchini’s
entourage, wrote on our drawings
“fascisti, capitalisti, assassini.”
Bressani: It was political at the time.
Šik: It was very leftist politics,
everything. Rossi, who claimed to
be Communist, nevertheless flirted
with an architecture with a, let us
say, Stalinist atmosphere.
Bressani: Repetitive and
monumental.
Šik: Repetition, monumentality, and
whatever else is described in Helmut
Spieker’s Totalitaere Architektur (1981).
All is symmetrical, axial, and so on.
78 Interview with Miroslav Šik
Bressani: You describe Rossi’s
method in a way that is not very
interesting: already belated and
copied and too strict. But you say he
was doing something else with your
class in 1977–78. You didn’t see much
of him, but he was doing something
else.
Šik: Yes. Rossi was bringing a whole
new set of references; no longer
just Lombardy and Razionalismo.
It generated a chaos of new ideas.
To start our projects, we adopted
references that no longer needed to
be from Rossi’s old repertoire. We
could choose our own. Of course,
most of us still kept something
from Rossi’s world, but suddenly
other things became available, even
high-tech buildings. At the end of
Rossi’s studio in 1977–78 (when he
never was there), half of the class
was still designing Rossiana, but
the other half was already moving
in another direction. You’d take
something as a reference, you’d
make a copy, and then you’d start
to change it a little bit, creating a
feeling of Verfremdung, estrange-
ment. Reference plus Verfremdung.
That was the important combina-
tion. You’d have to transform the
reference so that it would become
strange a little bit, so it didn’t look
exactly the same.
Bressani: It is an extension of the
principle of analogy, whereby there
is something hidden, lurking, or
repressed behind the surface.
Šik: That is what analogy will mean
for me from now on: a reference
plus Brechtian Verfremdung. But the
development of the idea was slow
and very chaotic. In December 1977,
I still probably designed Rossiana
a little bit, but others in our group
were more radical and started to do
things differently. Once Rossi had
left, nobody referred to him any
longer. Which doesn’t mean that our
thinking was not somehow linked to
his. We no longer used the typologi-
cal method, the classical plan
mixed with the Rossi-style facade,
but a tone was kept. And probably
more than the word atmosphere, we
start to use the words image and
analogy. The analogy is the collaged
and therefore already interpreted
image of a reference.
Bressani: What kind of image? A view,
a perspective?
Šik: Not yet. It remains vague. We
just used both words, analogy and
image. But the important thing
is that we no longer started with
typology. With Rossi, there was
never any discussion of the shape or
volumetric of a building. But with
our new understanding of references,
we’d see or imagine buildings as a
whole. We’d talk of the image of a
reference, which is already a way to
talk of atmosphere. You’d design an
image for this image.
Bressani: Can you explain what you
mean by “reference?” Do you mean
context? Say you have a project on
a site, you seek architectural refer-
ences for that specific project or that
specific site?
Šik: If you design a school, you seek
school references. Not program-
matic precedents from a functional
point of view, but reference in a
broader sense. Suddenly, we came
to the notion that a school, for
instance, has to be “schoolish.” It is a
question of mood.
Bressani: So it is of the order of a
feeling.
Šik: Yes.
Bressani: When did that happen?
Šik: Shortly before we finished our
diploma. About a year after Rossi
left. We were looking for something
else, even if the words were not yet
so precise. There was nobody to
talk with us. But as I said, we used
words like schoolish for designing a
school, or heimlich /wohnlich for house
design. They lead us eventually to
the word Stimmung (mood). We never
used the term atmosphere; we’d talk
about Stimmung. And this Stimmung
came from two sides: from the site,
the locus, and from the program.
Our designs were formed from a
combination of the two.
Bressani: Did you derive that method
yourself? Was it shared with your
group of classmates?
Šik: Yes, all of us.
Bressani: But the concept of atmo-
sphere, as a design method, is
associated directly with you.
Šik: It’s not correct. After 1983, I
did appropriate this method all for
myself. But not in 1978, 1979, 1980.
We were all together...and we drew all
our references from late modernism.
Without paying much attention to
postmodernism, to all these Charles
Moore, Robert Venturi, and even
Rossi references, we went back to
Bressani
the most beautiful modernism, that
of the late 1930s.
Bressani: So you were modernists
when the concept of Stimmung entered
your vocabulary?
Šik: Neomodernists, we used to say.
We were not interested in construc-
tion or in the social aspect of 1930s
modernism. We weren’t, for example,
fascinated by concrete as a progres-
sive material, but as a form of
tectonic for sculpting space. That
is how and when the neomodern
architecture of Switzerland starts—
not in the offices of Diener & Diener
or Herzog & de Meuron, but in that
class, influenced by Rossi, since it
was he who opened our eyes to the
architecture of the 1930s. Without
him, we would never have looked at
it. For about four or five years, we
copied a bit of Giuseppe Terragni, a
bit of Otto Haesler, and even some
Mies van der Rohe, though we more
often than not thought that the latter
was a bit too much. It had to be
pure, still reminding us of the white
forms of Rossi. But year by year,
the Rossi reminiscences progres-
sively disappeared.
Bressani: It remains therefore very
abstract, and still very far from where
you end up later.
Šik: Yes. But then a second tendency
comes into it, again inspired by Rossi,
which is a neorealist element coming
from the Veneto: a horse standing
over there, a small hut at the Lido
with blue and white stripes.
Bressani: When you say neorealism,
you mean the film movement?
Šik: Yes, thanks to Rossi we started
watching neorealistic films. Before
that, we didn’t know of Roberto
Rosselini or Vittorio de Sica. Don’t
forget that in 1980 some of us
were close to punks taking part
in the anarchist movement that
arose in Zurich from 1979 to 1983. I
even spent some time in jail. This
rebellious dimension is important.
JAE 73 : 1
Rossi was away and then suddenly in
Zurich there was a big anticapitalis-
tic movement, and a rebirth of the
rebel movement, which we joined,
including in the way we dressed and
the way we ate. Italian culture was
no longer our model. But coming
back to architecture, we were
working with a series of techniques
or concepts that were all linked
together in our mind: reference or
analogue, Verfremdung, neomodern-
ism, and words like schoolish, heimlich,
or dirty realism to vaguely express an
image. If somebody would ask us
what we were doing, we would say,
for instance, that we were building a
schoolish Stimmung.
Bressani: The construction of a mood.
Šik: And that is where it all started.
We entered competitions with
Marcel Meili and Axel Fickert, and we
always started with images. I’d make
a drawing, someone else would put
sketch paper over it, redraw his own
interpretation of my forms or enlarge
the sketch to a big perspective.
Bressani: Hand drawn?
Šik: Yes, always. Hand-drawn
perspectives. There was no other
way at the time. You asked me
when does the word atmosphere
or Stimmung emerged. It slowly
developed during these years, from
1979 to 1983, and from then on, it was
always present for us as a concept.
Sometimes we called it image, which
means the same, exactly the same.
Our projects were about making
Stimmung, making images.
Bressani: Literally speaking? No
models?
Šik: No, no space or structural
models, only white cubes inserted
in a 1:500 gypsum site model.
And no historical analysis. We no
longer studied the layers of all
the centuries to understand the
geometry of the street and so on. The
reference and the image were the
source of our work.
79

Figure 2. Top: Miroslav Šik. Competition entry for a
parish hall in the town of Egg, Switzerland, 1988.
Figure 3. Bottom: Fortunat Dettli. Railway Transport
building infrastructure. Student Project. ETH Zurich,
1987/88.
Bressani: What happened
after you graduated?
Šik: Our group disbanded after 1983.
Then Fabio Reinhart asked me if I
wanted to become his assistant. I was
running out of money, so I accepted.
Bressani: Was he still faithful to the
Rossi method?
Šik: Worse! He was in a postmodern
collage mode. But we knew each
other well and I was for him a brave
young man. So, in fall 1983 I became
his assistant. His design method
started to evolve. Every student had
to work with a specific analogy, a
different one for each. Fabio would
prescribe them. The program was
simple: a private library adjacent to
an existing house somewhere near
80 Interview with Miroslav Šik
Zurich. So you make a library as an
analogy to a temple because books
make up the temple of knowledge.
Or you make a library as an analogy
to a laboratory because books allow
one to discover new worlds. Or an
analogue to a labyrinth, and so on.
Seven analogies. I remember all of
them. But that was not enough for
Fabio. He asked students to do it in
a specific material, so a laboratory
or temple in concrete, for instance.
So students had to make a library/
temple in wood, concrete, brick,
steel. It was most effective because
students didn’t have to think much
about which analogy to choose...it
was given to them. We had Russian
constructivist laboratories. We had
Greek temples. It was fantastic
because there was suddenly a whole
new world of references, and it
didn’t have anything to do with
postmodernism, or even Rossi. It
was more of a “neo” trend, à la Otto
Wagner, Asplund, Leonidov, Le
Corbusier, all evoked through the
analogue method.
Bressani: What was the mode of
working?
Šik: We weren’t using perspec-
tive yet, but nice models with
detailed interiors like dollhouses
were built for the first semesters.
Later perspectives will replace such
models. The group of assistants,
apart from me, was Santiago
Calatrava, Luca Ortelli (a student of
Georgio Grassi), plus some technical
assistants. Students gravitated
toward the assistants more than
Fabio. They went to see who they
thought would understand them
best. All students who conceived
their library as a neoconstructiv-
ist spiral going to heaven came to
see me; if their library was a shell
or had thin spindle supports, they
went to see Calatrava; if it was of red
brick, like the buildings of Grassi,
they went to Ortelli.
Bressani: It meant a consider-
able expansion in language and
expression.
Šik: We thought we had discovered
a whole new method, with a
million metaphors. But then, for
the second semester, we gave
students the project to design an
exterior swimming pool in Carona
in the Ticino, where we traveled
with the students. But once there,
we asked ourselves: what are the
potential analogies for an exterior
swimming pool? And for two days
we couldn’t think of anything,
apart from evoking some nice
Victorian pools. Books you have
to protect, and therefore you can
invoke rich analogies for libraries,
but for swimming?
Bressani: The method found its limits.
Šik: Exactly. So, we went back to
what we had devised when I was a
student: we established our design
method as an analogy, which is
a transformed reference with
Gestalt (urban shape and space) and
Stimmung. The analogy had to be
presented as a real image and as a
verbal or descriptive image. In the
second semester of Fabio’s class,
this method was thus established
in an official way. In the first two
weeks, students made collages by
composing their set of references,
mounting them in a photo of the
site, of the locus. The collage was
already an image, little bit inaccurate
but showing a space and building
whole. You photocopied, cut, and
glued. They were collages, but with
trees, people, houses, and with
Gestalt and Stimmung. Students
had to determine the time of day
represented; if it was three o’clock in
the afternoon, the shadows had to be
done a certain way, and so on.
Bressani: What were the references
used by students?
Šik: Still a little bit of Rossi and
Italian architecture. I must say I
was a little bit brutal at the time: I
eliminated all references I didn’t like.
If students wanted to use Rossi’s
architecture as reference, it was
okay, but it now had to become very
concrete, very precise, as a building.
One student wanted to use Rossi’s
Gallaratese for instance. I said ok,
but I asked him to go to Milan to
touch it, sleep in it for a whole night,
so as to understand how the building
works. That’s very different to the
Rossiana period when everything
Bressani
remained very abstract, mostly
using books and photographs.
And now the students had to
transform their reference, to feel
only part of it, a sort of weak tuning,
but not the whole.
Bressani: When did students start
to make the large A0 atmospheric
drawings you are famous for?
Šik: I first devised the technique
in 1985 when I was doing a
competition. I made a series of
A0 drawings by first covering the
entire surface with warm black
graphite, all darkened, and then
slowly proceeding by erasure,
bringing back light into the sheet
progressively to reveal architectural
forms or natural elements. It was a
technique I invented.
Bressani: You were drawing with light,
as it were; bringing light to construct
an atmosphere.
Šik: Yes. We tried using airbrush
but it took too long and needed
to be too precise.
Bressani: Yet, these charcoal draw-
ings do look rather precise.
Šik: No, there are not.
Just normal lines.
JAE 73 : 1
Bressani: So you brought that method
of drawing into Fabio’s studio.
Šik: Yes. Fabio was never there
because he won some competi-
tion in Berlin. So, I worked on this
method myself, eliminating all
the references I didn’t want. One
semester I got rid of all references
to Grassi, Rossi, even Otto Wagner.
Semester by semester, the old
school was progressively disappear-
ing. Bernard Rudolfsky’s Architecture
without Architects became an influence.
At that time, the old industries
started to leave Zurich as in the
rest of Europe. In 1985, the diploma
students at ETH were housed in an
old steel factory, smelling of dirty
oil. A nostalgic appeal for industrial
archaeology emerged. Films like
Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law, or
Wim Wenders’s Paris Texas became
important. So around 1986, most
of the references used by students
ceased to have names attached
to them; they drew from second-
class, anonymous architecture. You
can actually periodize different
phases in the analogue studio: at
the beginning, references were all
classic, high architecture designed
by famous old architects. After
1986, references were drawn from
the local context. The nearer your
references are to the place you are
designing, the less you can draw
from the canonic repertoire. After
all, here, in the next street, why
refer to Asplund? We call this period
Regionalism. Analog architecture
moved from classical references to
regional ones. And then we moved
a little bit further out of the city, to
its periphery. So three periods, three
types of Stimmung: classic, regional,
and peripheral. At the end of these
three periods we intended to melt
them all but it never happened.
Bressani: Then what happened?
Šik: They kicked us out of the
ETH; my work as assistant to Fabio
Figure 4. Urs Füssler. Housing development for
Hirslanden, Zurich. Student Project. ETH Zurich, 1989.
81

Figure 5. Joëlle Thomas. House for Music in
Wiedikon, Zurich. Student Project. ETH Zurich, 2015.
Reinhart was finished. I left and won
three competitions and started my
own practice. I was away from the
ETH for almost ten years before
I returned as a professor. The
concept of atmosphere became more
complicated after that. Buildings
must have a strong image, but
they must have a built form too; it
should not be attractive only at the
image level. And also, you cannot
always design exceptional buildings.
I discovered the simple houses of
Heinrich Tessenow, Kay Fisker, or
Hans Döllgast, just simple house,
simple roof. In a way, I was coming
back to the first Rossi, before Rossi
became the late Rossi. My buildings
are often very quiet. In the first
period of analogue architecture, we
didn’t appreciate simple painted
walls, well-proportioned windows.
We wanted to do spectacular
buildings. Christian Kerez or Valerio
Olgiati, who were my students and
whose work I do appreciate, have
kept to that more spectacular mode.
Bressani: You once called yourself a
traditionalist, with a certain combat-
ive intention.
Šik: I don’t like that term anymore
because of its dark field of
82 Interview with Miroslav Šik
Eva Willenegger, Lukas Imhof,
and Miroslav Šik, Analoge AltNeue
Architektur (Luzern: Quart Verlag
GmbH, 2018). An English transla-
tion is forthcoming.
Author Biography
Miroslav Šik is a Swiss architect and
theoretician of Czech origin, recently
retired from the ETH Zurich where
he was professor since 1999. He is
one of the founders and the chief
exponent of Analoge Architektur, a
design method that influenced a
whole generation of Swiss architects
and made mood and atmosphere its
key concern. He received in 2017 an
honorary doctorate from the Czech
Technical University in Prague.
This interview was conducted in
association. I discovered that a lot Zurich on October 3, 2018.
of my values goes back to reform
architecture. Cooperative living,
the other side of artistic architec-
ture; a form of building to which
analogue architecture never paid
much attention. Your architecture
has to be quiet because towns are
already 99 percent built, and you
cannot only build solitaire buildings
or flying saucers.
Bressani: But you’re not nostalgic for
old Switzerland or the old city?
Šik: You have to make it a little bit
more noble than it is. Nobilitierung.
You have to make it in a new way.
And that means that the tradition
will never stay 100 percent the same.
We must adapt to new laws and to
new ways of living, and we must
reckon with the Global and the
Radical. The high and low, the new
and old, the cosy and cool, the tech
and hand-made, the local and exotic
must be mixed, creating an old/new
architecture as a coherent ensemble
that is good for everybody.
• • •
To read further on the work of
Miroslav Šik and his students, see
the recently published monograph: