Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron - responsible for some of the most noteworthy building projects of the past 40 years, including Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Stadium and museum of visual culture M+ in Hong Kong - are celebrating their achievements this summer at the Royal Academy. A wide-ranging show, it features displays of their methods, materials and technologies, co-curated with Herzog and de Meuron themselves.

Ahead of the show Building Design had a rare opportunity to talk to de Meuron at the duo’s headquarters in Basel, the Swiss city where the architects met as seven-year-olds at primary school in 1957. De Meuron still remembers that first encounter: “It was our great luck that we grew up a quarter of a mile away from each other and went to the same school,” he says. “That’s interesting to me spatially. At that time, the radiuses of children and families were quite small. It was much more neighbourhood-related. I went to one kindergarten; Jacques went to another kindergarten, but then we went to the same school and we were together. We don’t emotionalise it. We don’t make it nostalgic or kitschy – but this is how it is.”

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