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Concept
Valerio Olgiati
Summary
Valerio Olgiati (born 1958) is a Swiss architect. He initially studied architecture at ETH Zurich, a public research university in Zurich, Switzerland, after which he lived in Switzerland, followed by Los Angeles in the United States.
He made a name for himself with the School Building in Paspels in 1998 and the Yellow House Museum in Flims in 1999. Other recognized buildings by him are the House for the Musician/Atelier Bardill in Scharans, the Villa Além in Alentejo, the UNESCO World Heritage Bahrain Pearling Trail Visiting Center in Muharraq, and the Baloise Insurance Building in Basel.
Olgiati calls his work "non-referential architecture", the title of a 2018 treatise by Olgiati and architectural theoretician Markus Breitschmid about the social purpose of architecture for the people of the 21st century.
Olgiati and Breitschmid write that "non-referential architecture is not an architecture that subsists as a referential vessel or as a symbol of something outside itself. Non-referential buildings are entities that are themselves meaningful and sense-making and, as such, no less the embodiment of society than buildings were in the past when they were the bearers of common social ideals."
The first documented use of the term "non-referential" in architecture appears in a reprint of an interview between Olgiati and Breitschmid in the Italian architecture journal Domus. In 2014, Breitschmid publishes a rebuttal titled "Architektur leitet sich von Architektur ab" (Architecture is Derived from Architecture) in the Swiss journal Werk, Bauen + Wohnen, thereby responding to an architectural claim made by others that attempts to imbue meaning into architecture from the extra-architectural, such as the economic, ecological, political. Architect Christian Kerez investigated the limits of referentiality and speaks of "non-referential space" as a quality of his contribution for the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2016.
Official source
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