Jeannette Kuo (Indonesia, 1978) and Ünal Karamuk (Zurich, 1978) opened their office in Zurich in 2010. In the decade since then, partly thanks to the Swiss design-competition system, they have been very busy creating sports complexes, schools, theatres, single-family houses, collective housing units and mixed-use buildings. Parallel to architectural design, Kuo works an educator and publicist, taking part in a debate with ancient theoretical roots, namely the current nature of workplaces.

Karamuk Kuo Architects belongs to a new generation of architecture practices whose members, educated as they were in open and dynamic academical environments, staunchly believe in the role that architecture plays in shaping better surroundings. This results in buildings where motifs of a melancholic nature that were close to the heart of other generations of architects (such as the fragment or the ruin), the use of materials in their raw state, or the application of eccentric solutions have all been replaced with constructions that harmonise with their place, and spaces distinguished by natural materials and smooth finishes conceived to favour human relationships. To this we add the capacity of Karamuk Kuo Architects to turn the design programmes and limits into challenges that are met with previously unseen solutions.

Novel but pertinent and appropriate are the designs for the kindergarten in Aadorf (2013), the school complex in Rapperswil-Jona, Saint Gallen (2017), the International Academy of Sport Science and Technology in Lausanne (2018) and the apartment building in Cham (2019). All allow us to inscribe the work by Karamuk Kuo Architects in a culturally sophisticated line of thought by which the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

At the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial, the practice displayed the installation Infinitely Intimate, based on the current political climate in the US and inspired by the American Bar made by Adolf Loos in Vienna in 1908 – a hermetic box, mute on the outside, that encloses an environment of infinite space, “a world that can only be experienced by those who take the time to look inside and slow their gaze,” writes the duo.