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Herzog & de Meuron is a Swiss architecture firm founded in Basel in 1978 by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. Over more than four decades, the practice has built an international reputation for converting derelict industrial structures into cultural landmarks, pushing the boundaries of materiality, and producing buildings that resist easy stylistic classification. Their work ranges from a converted power station in London to a glass wave rising above a Hamburg harbor warehouse, always shaped by the same core question: what can a building become when it listens carefully to where it already stands?
Who Are Herzog & de Meuron?
Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron were born in Basel in 1950 and studied architecture together at ETH Zurich under Aldo Rossi. They established Herzog & de Meuron Architekten in Basel in 1978, and the firm has since grown to over 600 employees across offices in Basel, Hamburg, London, Hong Kong, New York, and elsewhere.
The practice operates as a collaborative studio. Five senior partners, including Ascan Mergenthaler and Stefan Marbach, work alongside the founders, and the firm draws on architects, engineers, and consultants from across disciplines. This model has allowed Herzog and de Meuron to scale from small residential projects to large cultural institutions without losing the material precision that defines their work.
Their awards trace the arc of a firm that moved steadily from regional recognition to global influence. The Pritzker Architecture Prize, won in 2001, confirmed their standing internationally. The RIBA Royal Gold Medal followed in 2007, along with the Praemium Imperiale from Japan and, in 2014, the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize.
💡 Pro Tip
When studying Herzog & de Meuron projects, focus on the transition zones between old fabric and new insertions rather than the headline gestures. Their most instructive design decisions happen in the joins: how a glass skin meets brick, or how a concrete floor plate meets an original steel column. That is where their material philosophy becomes readable.
What Makes Herzog & de Meuron Architecture Distinctive?
The firm does not have a single trademark style, which is both their strength and the reason they remain difficult to categorize. What connects their projects is an obsessive attention to surfaces, materials, and the relationship between a building’s new program and its existing physical or cultural context.
In early projects from the 1980s and early 1990s, the practice explored minimal interventions on rural Swiss structures, working with timber cladding, corrugated metal, and copper in ways that questioned what a facade could do beyond providing shelter. The Stone House in Tavole (1988) and the Ricola Storage Building in Laufen (1987) showed a practice testing materials at a small scale before moving those experiments onto larger canvases.
By the mid-1990s, Herzog and de Meuron were winning international competitions. Their approach to materiality scaled up: silk-screened glass, photo-etched copper panels, patterned concrete, and woven metal mesh all appeared as primary surface treatments on buildings where the skin itself communicated content rather than simply covering structure.
🎓 Expert Insight
“Their buildings make you feel the weight of time and the lightness of invention at the same moment. That tension is what keeps them interesting.” — Jury Citation, Pritzker Architecture Prize, 2001
The citation captures the essential contradiction in Herzog & de Meuron architecture: buildings that feel historically rooted and formally experimental at the same time. This is not accidental but the result of a sustained design methodology built around site-specific material research.
Herzog & de Meuron Buildings: Five Projects That Define the Practice
The portfolio of Herzog and de Meuron buildings spans museums, concert halls, stadiums, hospitals, and housing. Five projects, more than any others, reveal the full range of their approach.
Tate Modern, London (2000 and 2016)
The conversion of Giles Gilbert Scott’s Bankside Power Station into the Tate Modern is the project that brought Herzog and de Meuron to the attention of a global public. The decision to retain the massive turbine hall, removing only the generating equipment and opening the vast volume to public use, was a statement about how industrial space could become civic infrastructure. The building opened in 2000 and attracted more than five million visitors in its first year, significantly exceeding projections.
The 2016 Switch House extension added a further ten floors of gallery, education, and public space in a twisted brick tower designed to respond to the original building’s mass while creating a new public viewing platform over the Thames. Together, the two phases of the Tate Modern represent the most visited modern art museum in the world and the clearest demonstration of how de Meuron Herzog approach adaptive reuse as urban transformation rather than conservation alone. More on how this type of intervention connects to broader trends is covered in the adaptive architecture guide on this site.
🏗️ Real-World Example
Tate Modern Switch House Extension (London, 2016): The 65-metre twisted brick tower added 60% more gallery and public space to the original conversion. Its triangular plan was chosen specifically to draw visitors from the surrounding Bankside neighborhood, not just from the original turbine hall entrance. The public viewing terrace on level 10 has no admission charge, embedding the building into daily city life rather than restricting access to paying visitors.
Allianz Arena, Munich (2005)
The Allianz Arena introduced a new building type: a stadium that changes identity. Its facade of 2,874 ETFE cushion panels can be lit in red, white, or blue depending on which Munich club is playing. The structure demonstrated that a sports venue could be an active urban landmark rather than a dormant container, and it became one of the most photographed stadiums in Europe within a year of opening.
Beijing National Stadium, China (2008)
The Bird’s Nest, built for the 2008 Olympic Games in collaboration with artist Ai Weiwei, brought Herzog & de Meuron architects into the largest project they had undertaken. The stadium’s structural system, a weave of steel members that serves as both structure and ornament simultaneously, was the result of an extended investigation into how a building might function as a large-scale public artwork. The project also marked the beginning of their ongoing collaboration with Ai Weiwei.
Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg (2017)
The Elbphilharmonie placed a glass wave housing three concert halls, a hotel, apartments, and a public plaza on top of a 1960s brick harbor warehouse in Hamburg’s HafenCity district. The project took more than a decade to complete and attracted significant public scrutiny over cost overruns, but its opening in January 2017 was immediately recognized as a cultural event. Within five years, the building’s eighth-floor Plaza had received 14.5 million visitors, according to the World Cities Culture Forum, and concert audiences in Hamburg tripled compared to pre-opening figures.
The Grand Concert Hall’s acoustic design, developed with specialist Yasuhisa Toyota, places no seat more than 30 metres from the conductor. The vineyard-style seating arrangement draws on the ancient Greek amphitheater, a sports arena, and a festival tent as reference types. This is Herzog de Meuron architecture at its most programmatically ambitious: a building that houses music, housing, hospitality, and public space in a single structure, using a derelict warehouse as its foundation.
📌 Did You Know?
The Elbphilharmonie’s glass facade consists of 1,096 individually curved window panels, each one unique in curvature. The wave shape of the roofline is not purely aesthetic: it is calculated to create a smooth visual transition between the historic brick warehouse below and the glass volume above, so that from a distance the building reads as a single continuous form rather than two stacked structures.
M+ Museum, Hong Kong (2021)
The M+ is the most recent major Herzog & de Meuron building to open. Located on Victoria Harbour in the West Kowloon Cultural District, the museum for visual culture houses a collection of 20th and 21st century art and design from Hong Kong, China, and the broader Asia-Pacific region. Its LED facade screen, visible across the harbor, can display works from the collection at architectural scale after dark, extending the museum’s program into the urban landscape.
How Does Herzog & de Meuron Handle Industrial Heritage?
The treatment of existing industrial fabric is not accidental in Herzog and de Meuron architecture. It reflects a consistent position: that buildings carry memory, and that this memory is an architectural resource rather than an obstacle to new programs. The practice rarely demolishes what it finds. Instead, it interrogates the structure, the materials, and the spatial logic of what exists, then builds a dialogue between the original and the new.
The Tate Modern retains its original brick shell, its turbine hall floors, and the chimney that marks the building on the London skyline. The Elbphilharmonie keeps the full volume of the Kaispeicher warehouse, including the character of the original brick, visible from the outside at the base of the new glass structure. In each case, the industrial past is not hidden but foregrounded.
This approach differs from simple preservation. The firm does not aim to freeze a building in its original condition. The goal is to activate the historical layers of a site by introducing new programs that could not exist without the existing structure. The tension between old and new is the architectural content.
For architects interested in how this methodology compares to other Swiss practices that prioritize material honesty and site specificity, the article on Peter Zumthor’s architecture provides a useful counterpoint. Where Zumthor tends toward smaller, more contemplative buildings, Herzog and de Meuron have applied similar material convictions to infrastructure-scale cultural projects.
💡 Pro Tip
If you are working on a project that involves an existing industrial building, study how Herzog & de Meuron handle the seam between old and new rather than the new volume itself. Their most important design decisions are at the thresholds: where the new circulation system meets the old structure, where the new facade material starts, and where the original floor levels are preserved or interrupted. Getting these transitions right is what separates a successful conversion from a building that feels grafted onto its host.
What Is the Current Work of Herzog & de Meuron?
The firm continues to take on culturally significant projects. In Basel, their ongoing renovation and expansion of the Stadtcasino restored a historic 19th-century concert hall while introducing a new entrance pavilion and improved acoustics. In Zurich, the Kinderspital children’s hospital has been a long-term project combining medical functionality with evidence-based design principles aimed at reducing patient stress and improving recovery outcomes.
Current projects across the firm’s portfolio include residential developments, urban masterplans, and cultural institutions in Europe, North America, and Asia. The practice also publishes its complete works in collaboration with publisher Birkhäuser, with volumes covering different periods of the firm’s output and providing one of the most thorough architectural archives maintained by a living practice.
For a broader survey of how architects at this level have shaped the trajectory of modern architecture, the overview of architects who transformed the field provides useful context for where Herzog and de Meuron sit within the larger history of contemporary practice.
✅ Key Takeaways
- Herzog & de Meuron was founded in Basel in 1978 by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, both ETH Zurich graduates who trained under Aldo Rossi.
- The practice won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2001 and the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2007, among the most significant architectural honors available.
- Their approach to industrial heritage prioritizes dialogue between old fabric and new program rather than preservation or demolition, treating existing buildings as architectural resources.
- Key buildings include the Tate Modern in London, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, the Allianz Arena in Munich, the Bird’s Nest in Beijing, and the M+ in Hong Kong.
- The firm’s signature is material specificity: each project develops its own surface logic in response to program, context, and site rather than applying a house style.
Where to Learn More About Herzog & de Meuron
The official Herzog & de Meuron website maintains a complete project archive organized by project number, with full descriptions, team credits, and image documentation for every building. It is the most reliable primary source for project data and design statements.
For critical reviews of individual buildings, ArchDaily and Dezeen maintain extensive coverage of the firm’s output. The Pritzker Prize archive includes the full jury citation from 2001 and acceptance speeches from Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, which are among the clearest statements of their design philosophy in their own words. Academic access to El Croquis issues 84 and 109/110, both devoted to the firm, provides the most thorough analysis of their early and middle-period work respectively.
For context within Swiss architecture more broadly, the article on Peter Zumthor on this site covers the most significant parallel practice from the same generation and national context, and the comparison between the two firms’ approaches to materiality and site is a productive frame for understanding both.
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