Evening, 11^th November 2009 Graz, Austria.

A crowd of eager students and professionals gathered tightly into a crowded lecture hall of the Graz Technical University. People were packed right to the back, filing up the stairs, across the floor and even out down the corridor. All were present in anticipation of Valerio Olgiati’s arrival. He was billed to talk about his philosophy, professional approach and his latest architectural projects.

The presentation was in German and so my understanding was rather limited, but the visual presentation was clear and I was able to confer with colleagues afterwards. Taking the stage, Olgiati quickly made his charms known with a series of well timed and evidently popular jokes, delivered as he was fitted with a series of microphones.

Olgiati is well regarded world wide. He is associated with an impressive list of eminent teaching institutions and sporting an ever-growing catalogue of elegant and imaginative built work. And so it was something of an event for him to be speaking in Graz – not to detract from its own healthy regional scene which has long been of international significance.   [For a detailed history of it's most famous expressionist 'schule' and more minimalist practices see Peter Blundell Jones’ excellent, ‘Dialogues in Time’ published by the Graz HDA (Haus der Architectur). who, in co-operation with the university, organised the evening’s lecture.]

Olgiati began with a rather unapologetic announcement that his buildings, or at least their representation, are non-contextual.  He supported this assertion with a series of slides taken at an exhibition of his work where large white models of competitions and realised projects, detached from site and locale, were assembled in the beautiful haupthalle of the Semper designed Zurich University/ETH building.  I was immediately sympathetic to this approach.  In his later explanations, particularly of the EPFL, Lausanne University building, it was apparent that context could be a key factor in his design strategy but he never let the issue tyrannise or develop into empty rhetoric.  Consequently, it would seem his buildings stand for themselves without making excessive demands on their immediate environment and without forcing a single or even multifaceted interpretation of the human life and history that surround them.  They simply do their thing quietly and proudly in a provocatively self-resolved fashion.

‘Nächste’ was one of the few words I could pick out consistently but I felt I was following as he lead us through his projects. Firstly was a museum for the Swiss National Parc in Zernez – two symmetrical towers of monolithic insulating-concrete with only a few spare fixtures in bronze. All six floors are physically identical although none are true repetitions as they occur at different elevations or are reflections of a twin. The near identical cubic towers are mirrored diagonally across a shared corner, another square where vertical circulation also occurs. The window cases are brought inside the matching 190cm high apertures and fixed to the internal face of concrete walls. Olgiati reasoned this on the disparity of the required tolerance of metal fabrication and the comparatively ambiguous tolerances one must expect from concrete. This disparity is most commonly absorbed by silicon or expanding foam but not here. As the concrete is itself the insulation there is no need to detail around cold bridges and the frame is simply mortared to the wall.

A similar system is used in ‘House for a Musician’ although here the concrete is coloured red and is divided by an insulated cavity. More is made of the treatment of the concrete too. The walls and their rosaries, which make the building so distinctive, are cast in hand carved wooden forms no-less.

There was also a little time for an explanation of his favourite projects and how they had informed his philosophy. We saw a palace from Schinkel – laberthine behind an ordered façade – the spiritual path of Hindu, Mughal and Shinto temples and their materials of hot red stone or transient wooden frame. Everything linked elegantly back to his built work, most notably to his new studio, a black wooden box hovering in a concrete tray over a black asphalt yard come basement. Just as in the Shinto shrine, this otherwise loose structure is stiffened by a central column. Similarly, the path through spirals clockwise whereas in the shrine it had circled.

After the talk concluded a short pre-filmed interview was screened. Olgiati sat and watched with the rest of us and did so encouragingly but he flinched perceptibly on occasions, particularly when making affirmations of his desire for totality within each project. That is totality of material, totality of construction and totality of the expression, although with Olgiati they often become inseparable. He insisted that such was the order of this totality that he wished a project would break to pieces, crumble, if a single element were removed or altered. There is something enchantingly medieval about this alchemy. Materials matter not only for their preciousness but because ideas, work and personality are teeming within them. They have a life of their own.

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