Swissness Applied

Winner of DAM Architectural Book Award 2022, Swissness Applied: Learning from New Glarus is a book that comprises a huge tour de force project orchested by Architecture Office over the course of years of work.

Nicole McIntosh and Jonathan Louie (AO) traveled, studied and compiled archives, making a unique kind of Swiss architectural theme in small towns in the US, in their subject for a larger research project. McIntosh and Louie also began to hack these Swiss aesthetics into experimental proposals, and began a number of exhibitions with all this material.

Essays, drawings, models, archives, photographs, documentation, fictions, municipal codes…  All this material is condensed inside the book trying at the same time, to arrange all this information in a comprehensive way but also trying to preserve the heterogeneous nature of each source of the investigation and every stem of the project.

To shape and edit this book, McIntosh and Louie reunited a group of writers in order to discuss and bring new ideas over heritage, appropriation, image making, cultural transfer, and the frictions between tradition and modernity.

This book design is typesetted with Founders Grotesk for titles, a North American contemporary sans, and Neue Haas Grotesk for text, as the Swiss counterpart.