Together, Berlin-based architect Arno Brandlhuber and film maker Christopher Roth, are exploring the Swiss building code, the “most important book of all for architects”, specifically the relationship between building regulations and architecture. How do certain laws determine architectural possibilities? How can architects, in turn, shape those laws?

Accompanying an exhibition at the ETH Zürich, Legislating Architecture Schweiz serves as a fragmentary reference book. It retraces the chronology of referendums held in Zürich on architectural issues, shedding light on controversial nationwide referendums as well. Different strategies of bringing influence to bear on the referendums emerge; recurrent conventionalized graphic techniques used on referendum posters, artistically expressed political statements and even protests in the real space of the city go to show there isn’t only a politics of architecture, but also an architecture of politics.

The text is interwoven with dialog in the form of Arno Brandlhuber’s conversations with Marc Angélil, Adam Caruso, Tom Emerson, Patrick Frey, Christian Kerez and Christopher Roth.

Arno Brandlhuber is the founder of brandlhuber+ Berlin. He holds the chair of architecture and urban research at the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg and is directing the nomadic masters program a42.org. He is co-founder of the public seminar Akademie c/o, which has been doing research on the spatial production of the Berlin Republic.

Christopher Roth works as an artist and director. His practice may be best understood as a proactive intellectual scholarship combining the factual and fictitious with both analytic and poetic qualities.

Published in the series of publications STUDIOLO / Edition Patrick Frey