3 – 2010

et cetera DSDHA

DSDHA stands for the names of the London architects whose work we introduce to you in the first article. They have already handled an astonishing variety of commissions, at both the small and the large scale. They leave much in the design process open, often working with the principle of layering that does not reveal absolutely everything, also allows the unforeseen and, at times, can be clearly ambiguous. On looking more closely what seemed simple turns out to be difficult, what appears clear is ambiguous. So a building can at one and the same time be an “image” of itself or of the archetype that it represents. In Weil am Rhein we encounter a building that, while it is called a “house” in fact is not a house at all – but consists of an entire stack of houses. These look the way every child imagines a house and make the entire “Vitra House” into an artfully multiplied image of itself. We hope for the opposite: that this issue succeeds in surprising, in showing what lies beneath the surface of things, and in describing and explaining the substance behind the appearance.