Embedded in modernity is a history of projective architectural practice that has been concerned with the transformation of subjectivity and society. Today again, in an era profoundly troubled by challenges of unprecedented complexity and scale, by habits and values in need of critical revision, we aspire to an architecture that performs as agent of change in the way how it intervenes in communities and their forms of everyday practice, in ecological milieus and their material flows, and in physical place and its articulation of reality.

Architecture is an essential instrument in the production of social space. Our work seeks to strengthen social cohesion by fostering encounter, interaction, and participation. We strive to encourage contemporary, non-ideological forms of collectivity. Collaborating in co-creation with owners, users, and other actors during the design phases, we prioritize collective alliance-building and decision-making over individualistic action, allowing confronting social, political, and ethical questions to rise and to be negotiated. And we pursue to make buildings that grant the same degree of involvement to future generations by allowing change and reconfiguration.

Engaging in a post-anthropocentric, expanded notion of collectivity has led us to explore with architectural means the inclusion of non-human agency, such as selected species of environmental milieus and technological regimes. It has directed our concern onto the health of people and environments, on reducing building waste by applying concepts of life-span differentiation and circularity to design and detailing, and on reducing CO2-emissions by starting to build with timber.

Yet beyond its socio-ecological instrumentality, architecture as a physical construct is able to trigger the mystery of space. It is a tectonic object orchestrating sensual materiality and staging particular atmospheres.

Olaf Gipser Architects

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