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The Parrish Art Museum sits low and long under a deep roof among potato fields and tall grass. It is not yet complete but already its barn-like profile is a feature in the landscape, a silvery horizon. The museum in South Hampton, New York, has been designed by Swiss architecture practice Herzog and de Meuron and is due to open next year. While at 3,200 sq m the Parrish Art Museum seems a surprisingly low-key project for the internationally renowned practice, its rich context set in the Hamptons’ artist community, which blossomed during the Sixties and Seventies with residents that included Roy Lichtenstein and Jackson Pollock, is closely aligned with Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron’s approach to design, which is also inextricably linked to art.

The pairing of project and practice becomes even stronger in the form of the new museum, taking its lead from the surrounding radical architectures devised by the likes of artists Robert Motherwell and Pierre Chareau, whose repurposed Second World War storage units, kit-of-parts Nissen huts, set an aesthetic tone of industry and experimentation in the open, light-filled landscape. ‘[Sculptor Alexander] Calder came and painted his red inside and [playwright] Samuel Beckett stayed here,’ says critic and former curator at the Parrish, Alastair Gordon. ‘It is a convergence of creativity and invention in one place.’ On a recent visit to the museum, Herzog admits to tinkering with some details to allow more light into the building. ‘It’s dangerous to let architects visit the construction site at this stage,’ he jokes. But this appreciation for the area’s best asset is compounded by a long-time preoccupation with perception and collaboration with artists. When they started their office in the late Seventies neither had a clear vision or mission for their practice. While Herzog began studying biology and chemistry and de Meuron was involved in structural engineering, the childhood friends’ lack of clarity led them to architecture, and from 1970–1975 they both studied at ETH Zurich with Aldo Rossi and Dolf Schnebli. ‘We thought that maybe architecture could be something interesting – an intersection of many other disciplines,’ says Herzog. ‘We had lots of artists in our circle of friends.’ One in particular, Remy Zaugg, would become an important part of their development and thinking (Zaugg’s 1986 essay Das Museum, das ich Mir Erträume, is widely regarded as a game-changer for how the Western world viewed museums). In the early years, the three of them travelled together and colluded on masterplans and urban designs. Disillusioned with the end of modernism and uninterested in the shift  of postmodernism into deconstructivism, Herzog and de Meuron found their projects fell into what was later described as minimalism. ‘We didn’t know which direction we would go in,’ says Herzog, ‘but no one was thinking minimalism was what we were doing. It was an art term, it wasn’t being used in architecture.’ Herzog is clear, however, that there is a distinction between art and architecture: ‘It is a dangerous question: sometimes architecture is close to art, on the other hand architecture also has a very functional side,’ he says. ‘Architecture has to work and it’s annoying if it doesn’t.’

The tightly woven connection with art became a trajectory and projects such as the HQ for La Roche, Basel, which began in 1993 and completed in 2000, and its accompanying monograph, Architecture by Herzog and de Meuron; Wall Painting by Remy Zaugg: A Work for Roche Basel, revealed the practice’s highly collaborative nature, not least informed by the fact that there have always been two practice principals. With each project grounded from the outset in a dialogue, the practice was able to develop in a more fluid and critical way than more ostensibly hierarchical offices. ‘We are very different,’ says Herzog (‘de Meuron does the work,’ he laughs), ‘but we’ve been doing things together because it’s faster and the outcome is less based on one person. You get rid of obsessions more easily.’ Rebuking the idea of single authorship and personal style – ‘We always  wanted to escape that,’ – Herzog believes their work benefits from difference  and distinction. In a recent study, as part of their teaching at ETH Studio  Basel, Herzog, de Meuron and fellow tutors Roger Diener and Marcel Mieli  identified specificity in urban planning as an interesting outcome of  globalisation, rather than the more common opinion that 21st-century cities  are more generic. ‘Cities become more like characters; the older they get the  more they have specific patterns,’ says Herzog. ‘This century has started with  making these differences very apparent, bringing back the notion of reality;  real disasters, real earthquakes, real bombing, not everything disappears in a  cloud of virtuality as they were telling us at the end of the 20th century, based on French philosophy and deconstructivism.’ When published, the investigation will be Studio Basel’s ninth research project. Slow but considered, it seems the office and its teaching works at a pace that isn’t set by trends or forces other than what data and conversations require. Gestation and analysis are key aspects of their work. [caption id="" align="alignleft" width="274" caption="The Park Avenue Armoury, New York"][/caption] Herzog doesn’t underplay the vital role that teaching has in the practice either: ‘We use architecture as a tool to understand what goes on in the world,’ he says. ‘Architecture touches on so many things... it is the petrification of our societies. I think that every generation looks at this in a different way and through teaching you have another approach, another access to the world.’ The studio focuses on in-depth research into the contemporary city. Interestingly, its own location in Basel, away from the main university campus in Zurich, has had an impact on shifting the geopolitical and aesthetic landscape of its local environment by attracting other studios, including the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne's (EPFL) Laba run by Harry Gugger to settle there. ‘Somehow, making that geographical shift is part of the message: ETH Zurich is a great school but we think architecture schools shouldn’t be too large,’ says Herzog. ‘Students should travel and have a different perspective.’ Though Basel is not counted among the architecture capitals, such as London and New York, Herzog remains resolute and clear about the significance of staying put. When asked why his practice remains in Basel his answer is direct: ‘Where else?’ Indeed, the notion of specificity filters through all the practice’s projects. It would be callous to assume that the reuse of designs act as a family without differentiation. The original village model for the Parrish Art Museum went on to inform the arrangement of the ongoing Guadalajara Museum, or the continuation of themes, such as the structured genealogy that produced the stack system, as seen in the Vitrahaus and Lymen House as well as resonating through the Parrish Art Museum.  With each project the designers tease out the details, the context, introduce the materials and precisely peel back the layers of history and value embedded in the project. ‘Restoration – there always exists something – never a vacuum,’ says Herzog. [caption id="" align="alignright" width="252" caption="The Basel Cultural Museum"][/caption] Its work restoring buildings, such as  the recently opened Park Avenue  Armoury in New York and the Basel  Cultural Museum, have become as  integral to the architects’ dextrous  design handiwork as its ground-up  projects. In October, the practice  announced its selection as project  architects for the new Blavatnik  School of Government in Oxford and  the Gymnasium Project in Natal,  Brazil. The varying challenges of each speak of the practice’s breadth of perspective and versatility, as well as their celebrity status. In its mature days the office is becoming increasingly transparent. This year it launched its first website – functional ‘white pages’ of text, with windows opening on to individual aspects of the practice. For an office that has until now almost solely communicated its philosophy and physical manifestations through essays, carefully orchestrated interviews and well considered monographs, this new venture speaks volumes about the way it wants to be received. ‘It wasn’t because we thought we were being cool,’ says Herzog. ‘It just took a long time, four or five years, to make decisions about it and put it together.’ Like a considered artwork, the website has become a living part of the practice: an appendage. After 30 years, Herzog and de Meuron have anchored their reputation with projects such as Tate Modern (2000), the Bird’s Nest (2008) and 1111 Lincoln Road (2009) and other scales such as the Parrish and the Museum of Culture in Basel. The recurring theme of discussion, gestation and collaboration, either with a client, artist, photographer or architect, avoids the practice being limited by its own style. Herzog points to architecture’s specificity as a reason for his ongoing passion for the discipline. 'Great buildings have that one thing that is so important, it sets them apart,' he says. 'It may be difficult to describe… a technical description or a functional diagram doesn't do it, but you can somewhat feel it, you will understand that it is great, maybe without even liking it… this is what makes architecture so interesting and different from other things like sculpture or painting.'