Joseph Smolenicky
Joseph Smolenicky
SWITZERLAND - Is Joseph Smolenicky a new Swiss starchitect? No, he's been around for quite some time, but has only just started causing a stir with a few larger projects. His Tamina Therme thermal baths and the Sempachersee Golf Club seem like a throwback to another age. 1910s? 1920s? The Reform Movement? Is architecture derived from bygone styles a viable solution? We wanted to know, so we sent two A10 correspondents to meet Smolenicky – and to test the waters.
Biography
Born in 1960, Joseph Smolenicky was an adherent of 'Analog Architecture' in the 1980s, one of the black-clad students who gathered around visiting professor Fabio Reinhard and his assistant professor Miroslav Šik at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and who unsettled the Modernists with large, nostalgically bleak oil pastel drawings. Smolenicky himself later became an assistant professor, first under Reinhard and then under Hans Kollhoff. In the 1990s he abandoned his academic career and took up interior design. Since 2004, Joseph Smolenicky has headed Smolenicky & Partner.
Profile
Oliver Elser + Axel Simon: What kind of a reaction do you get from fellow Swiss architects to your current building projects?
Joseph Smolenicky: We all try not to step on one another’s toes here in Switzerland. After all, we are crowded into a rather small space. Discourse takes place through journals and magazines, and, of course, the completed work itself.
OE+AS: We offered an article about your Tamina Therme to a German architecture magazine. Normally quite open to supposedly conservative ideas, the editor-in-chief was horrified and rejected the proposal, muttering something about 'castrated postmodernism'. How important is it to you to be provocative?
JS: It's not a question of provocation. Architecture is not the right field for such an endeavour. I am rather surprised by the kind of approaches that are readily accepted by both architects and critics today.
OE+AS: In what way?
JS: For example, it is taken for granted that autonomous objects can be plonked down anywhere. Integration is of no great concern. A kind of 'sex appeal of objects' predominates at the moment. Too little is said about the context. Of course, an object’s sex appeal is easier to convey in images. The provincialization of globalism also frightens me. The ten most popular architecture magazines are found on the desks of half the architecture studios around the world and everybody is gazing at the architecture featured in them. This phenomenon blocks out everything else and the huge diversity in the world suffers.
Architecture, Interior, Theory
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