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Distributed for Park Books

EM2N—City Factory

Advocating for a City of Tolerant Co-Existence

First new book in more than a decade on renowned Zurich-based architecture firm EM2N.
 
Zurich-based architecture firm EM2N has been working on urban transformation processes ever since its establishment in 1997. More than half of their projects consist of conversions of existing buildings, resulting in numerous successes and few failures, small structures and large-scale complexes, quick decisions, and slow processes. What unites the designs, projects, and texts featured in this book is a profound interest in the concept of the city as an exciting, contradictory, and above all productive space of human life that the founding partners of EM2N—Mathias Müller and Daniel Niggli—have maintained throughout their twenty-five years of collaboration.
 
The EM2N—City Factory offers a self-critical review of the founders’ achievements and a close view on their learning processes, personal interests, and conceptual approaches to future tasks in ever-changing cities. This is supplemented with contributions from fellow architects and friends as well as with a wealth of photographs, plans, drawings, and other illustrations.
 

508 pages | 625 color plates, 291 halftones | 8 1/2 x 12 1/2 | © 2023

Architecture: European Architecture


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Reviews

"New book EM2N City Factory poses a seemingly simple question: 'Are cities everything that they can be for the people who live in them?' For Mathias Müller and Daniel Niggli, who co-founded Zürich-based architecture firm EM2N in 1997, the answer is yes – but they need architects to design them holistically. Enter the notion of a 'city factory', a place where work and life combine to create a vibrant urban landscape. The monograph, published by Park Books, reflects this idea in its collage-like structure. Maps of buildings tucked beneath viaducts and master plans of schools in constrained urban environments are juxtaposed with photos and writing drawn from 25 years of the studio’s work across Zürich, Berlin, Brussels and Hamburg."

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