Philippe
Meyer

PROFILE

After his studies in architecture in Marseille in 1985, Philippe Meyer joined the Jourda-Perraudin firm in Lyon in 1986 and participated in the design and construction of the Lyon School of Architecture. In 1987, he joined the Reinhard und Partner office in Bern, and in 1989 he began teaching architectural design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. He won several competitions and in 1992 founded Meyer & Bouvier Architectes in Berne, followed by Geneva in 1995. After three further successes, including the Faculty of Psychology for the University of Geneva in 1997, the agency was commissioned to work on numerous and varied projects, and in particular won second prize for the fitting out of the Credit Suisse building in Zurich. Philippe Meyer continued to teach for twelve years at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and the Institute of Architecture of the University of Geneva, and since 2004 has been working independently. Author of the architecture catalogue for the 700th anniversary of the Swiss Confederation in 1991, active member of the SIA and the FAS, Philippe Meyer has also been the publishing director of the architecture magazine FACES since 2009. The Philippe Meyer Architecte sàrl agency, founded in 2017, was awarded the SIA Distinction in 2018 for the construction of a hotel in the old town of Geneva, and was selected to participate in the Venice Architecture Biennale. In the same year, he led a workshop on “elasticity” at the Porto School of Architecture. The Best Architects Distinction was awarded for the construction of a villa in Cologny-Geneva in 2019 and for the construction of a rental complex in Corsier-Geneva in 2021. From 2021, different interior design projects and furniture design projects: Transformation and interior design for Swiss Confederation in Paris in 2022. Transformation and design furniture for a retail and investment office in Geneva 2023-24. Housing project, condominium and cultural project in Geneva in study 2023-25. A monography of the agency’s main works was published by Quart Verlag in 2018.

APPROACH

“To build is to collaborate with earth, to put a human mark upon a landscape, modifying it forever thereby; the process contributes to that slow change which makes up the history of cities. To reconstruct is to collaborate with time gone by, penetrating or modifying its spirit, and carrying it toward a longer future. Thus beneath the stones we find the secret of the springs.”

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

Architecture is not a matter of style. A reflection of its time, it can only be contemporary. The main remaining question is breaking down the dichotomy between architecture and urbanism. To retrieve the inseparable link between territory and context, without opposing rupture and continuity. Escaping a current born from the culture of image, which progressively prioritizes design over architecture. It is very difficult to define any or one’s own architecture. A method, an approach can be told. The site and the them are the essential combination. The relationship of this combination inevitably finds its meaning through the materials and their manipulations, through the details and their executions. Built over time, culture, curiosity, study, paradoxically evolve more on a notion of speed than of duration. Impatience grows with knowledge.