‘A romance, Saint-Savin explained to him, must always have at its base a misconception – of a person, action, place, time, circumstance – and from that fundamental misconception episodic misconceptions must arise, developments, digressions, and finally unexpected and pleasant recognitions.’
Umberto Eco,
The Island of the Day Before
Architecture is a strange mixture of persistence and flux, an amalgamation of different types – some that have been around for over 5,000 years and others that were (re)invented yesterday.
The fact that these form-types change, according to different cycles and economies, and for different reasons, turns each building into a complex collage of the archaic and the current, the site-specific and the standard, the permanent and the spontaneous.
Only by looking at these types under a wide lens can we recognize the cultural preferences, forgotten symbolism, technological advances, mutations triggered by intensifying global exchange, climatic adaptions, political calculations, regulatory requirements, new digital regimes, and, somewhere in the mix – the ideas of the architect
At BÜRO Haller, strategic misconceptions are often applied in order to develop new architectural form-types.
By challangeing the relationship between programmatic preconditions and architectural forms, surprising solutions are found:
What happens, if a housing project takes the form of a stadium or if a market hall is arranged in a perfect circle?
Sometimes, these experimental collisions of program and form provoke new spatial realities and lead to unique experiences and new forms of interaction. This is, what architecture is about.
BÜRO Haller 