Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron are known for their innovative designs featuring geometric forms and unique facades. Some of their most recognizable works include the Bird's Nest stadium from the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Prada store in Tokyo with its curved glass facade, and the Allianz Arena soccer stadium in Munich which is illuminated by programmable lights in its ETFE skin. Their buildings demonstrate an ability to create new and often surprising architectural landscapes.

1. Buildings by Herzog & de
Meuron
After years of creating an architectural language of geometric
forms and innovative façades, Swiss architects Jacques Herzog
and Pierre de Meuron became the first duo in history to win the
Pritzker Prize in 2001. At the start of their careers, they attended
the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, both graduating
in 1975, and established their firm, Herzog & de Meuron, three
years later in Basel. Today some of their most recognizable works
include the 2008 Beijing Olympic Stadium, the structure famously
known as the Bird’s Nest, designed in collaboration with artist Ai
Weiwei; VitraHaus, their addition to the illustrious Vitra Design
museum, which sits alongside buildings by Frank Gehry and Zaha
Hadid; and Prada’s Tokyo flagship store, a luxury goods
destination designed with diamond-shaped panes of curved glass.
Their unconventional and often surprising approach to architectural
design demonstrates their virtuosic ability not only to envision a
new landscape for living, but also to create structures that
continually provoke, challenge, and inspire.
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2.  The largest school for contemporary dance in the world, the Laban Dance Centre
in London opened in 2003 with an exterior clad in glass and translucent
polycarbonate panels in light shades of lime, turquoise, and magenta. The
building’s interior was inspired by urban landscapes and features courtyard-like
meeting spaces and “streets.”
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 Photo: Christopher Groenhout/Getty Images
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 Better known as the Bird’s Nest, the Beijing National Stadium was designed by
Herzog & de Meuron with a consortium of architects and artist Ai Weiwei for the
2008 Summer Olympics. Completed the year before, the structure features a
chaotic web of steel beams that forms the exterior and, along with plastic
membrane, the roof as well.

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 The Prada flagship store in Tokyo’s fashionable Aoyama district, completed in
2003, features a crosshatched exterior with panes of concave, convex, and flat
panels of glass. This transparent façade not only illuminates the store with
natural light, but also provides playfully distorted views of the luxury goods within
and the city without.
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W A T C H
Downsizing Director Alexander Payne on the Challenge of Building
LeisureLand

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 Munich’s Allianz Arena soccer stadium, completed in 2005, is the home of two
local teams and was the site of the 2006 World Cup. Clad in inflated cushions of
ETFE plastic, it is equipped with digitally controlled lights that illuminate the
façade in varying patterns of white, red, or light blue.
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 The de Young Museum houses a fine arts collection in San Francisco’s Golden
Gate Park. This dimpled-copper structure replaced the original Egyptian-style
building, demolished after earthquake damage, and features a seismic buffer
system of ball-bearing sliding plates that allows the building to move up to three
feet.

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 Herzog & de Meuron designed this 2005 expansion of the Walker Art Museum in
Minneapolis, which added gallery and exhibition space, a theater, a restaurant,
and a shop. The addition included a geometric tower clad in panels of aluminum
mesh and a long, low glass structure.
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 Photo: José Miguel Hernandez/Getty Images
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 Designed for the 2004 Universal Forum of Cultures in Barcelona, the Forum
Building is a triangular structure clad in blue concrete and mirrored glass, meant
to evoke a sponge that has absorbed seawater. The architects designed the
building to lift off the ground, creating public space underneath punctuated by a
series of courtyards.

6. By Zoë Sessums
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 VitraHaus is Herzog & de Meuron’s contribution to the campus of Germany’s
Vitra Design Museum, which also includes structures by the likes of Frank Gehry,
Zaha Hadid, and Buckminster Fuller. Devised to house the museum’s home
collection, the building appears as a series of stacked houses, each clad in
charcoal-gray stucco with glass ends.
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 In collaboration with Ai Weiwei, Herzog & de Meuron designed the 2012 pavilion
for London’s Serpentine Gallery. Sunk into the ground, this iteration of the
museum’s annual summer structure featured a roof that doubled as a reflecting

7. pool or dance floor sans water, as well as excavated space underneath, with the
imagined foundations of previous pavilions covered in cork.
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 Photo: Michael Urban
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 Featuring a curving glass façade printed with a mélange of white letters from the
world’s alphabets, the Brandenburg Technical University Library in Cottbus,
Germany, was added to the school’s campus in 2004. The building’s footprint is
made up of amoeba-inspired curves that carefully direct the flow of movement
both inside and out.