Haven’t we all a huge pile of very handy but hardly used things in our house that fill our closets and make us need even more space than we already occupy? Swiss initiative Pumpipumpe wants to encourage urbanites to share all these occasionally used items with a handy set of stickers. The Pumpipume stickers, that can be stuck to front doors or mailboxes, allow urbanites to easily indicate which items they are willing to loan to neighbors. — popupcity.net

Switzerland’s two largest art museums are building extensions, although Basel is moving faster than its neighbour and sometimes rival, Zürich. In Basel, construction is proceeding apace on the Kunstmuseum’s project, across the street from the original museum. [...]

Meanwhile Zürich’s Kunsthaus has become embroiled in a dispute which has halted work this month. The Swiss environmental group Archicultura is objecting, and permission to build is being withheld by a canton court. — theartnewspaper.com

Family-owned Swiss luxury watchmaker Audemars Piguet have chosen BIG, HG Merz, Luchinger & Meyer, and Muller Illien as having the winning design for a new expansion of their headquarters in La Vallée de Joux, La Brassus, Switzerland. Adding quite the literal twist to the timeline concept, BIG's proposal -- titled Maison des Fondateurs -- dons a 25,000 ft. spiral-shaped museum that tells the centuries-long history of Audemars Piguet. — bustler.net

The Swiss architect Gion A Caminada is something of a cult figure. Now in his 50s, he's spent much of his working life since the late 1970s practising out of a small village called Vrin in the canton of Graubünden. [...]

Caminada's idea was to boost the place with a collection of well-designed and functional private and communal buildings, among them the Aussichtsturm Reussdelta, an ornithologists' observation tower, and Waldhuette, a woodland cabin containing a school classroom. — Phaidon

3xn was chosen by the International Olympic Committee as the architectural partner to design the new IOC Headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland. The IOC selected the Danish firm after a collective decision by the IOC Architecture College during a March 25 meeting...

The design for the new headquarters will be revealed at a later date arranged by the IOC. — bustler.net

In city after city, U.S. transit advocates face a similar problem: What to do with bad, or at least less-than-perfect, public transportation proposals? Big transit projects don’t come around every day, and rejecting a proposal, perhaps one with support in high places, in the hopes that something better will come along can leave you with nothing. — nextcity.org

Here's a pretty cool Warming Huts v. 2014 submission we received from APTUM Architecture, based in the U.S. and Switzerland. As its name states, APTUM's warming hut proposal was inspired by stalactite formations that hang from the ceilings of caves. — bustler.net

The new Raiffeisen Bank branch designed by NAU Architecture and Drexler Guinand Jauslin Architekten was completed this past May in the historical city center of Schaffhausen, Switzerland, after the design won first place in a competition back in May 2012. The design as a whole appeals to the senses, going beyond the basic functions of a bank to creating an open, welcoming place for customers through light, color, and efficient use of space. — bustler.net

They look like shelters for hikers in a national park, but these wooden sheds in Switzerland have a rather less innocent purpose – they provide a discreet location for men to have sex with prostitutes. — telegraph.co.uk

Now in its 8th year, the best architects award just announced its winners. Organized annually, the program recognizes outstanding architectural design in the German-speaking countries Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the South Tyrol province of Italy. — bustler.net

The city of Emmen, Switzerland has announced that Rotterdam architects MVRDV, together with investment corporation Senn BPM AG, Fontana Landscape architects and Wüest & Partner real estate consulting, are the winners of the Feldbreite competition for a housing block with 95 homes of 16 different types. — bustler.net

Inspired by many hiking trips that the two students from China have enjoyed during their studies at ETHZ, the entry is based on the idea of a hypothetical mudflow in the Swiss Alps burying a village. The project works with columns of transparent thermoplastic planted into the earth as a metaphorical representation of the former village. Sunlight is being transmitted through the columns into the subterranean space, where they illuminate a poetic memory of the former rooms in the buried houses. — BLDGBLOG

Le Corbusier, Herzog & De Meuron, Mario Botta and Peter Zumthor - to mention only the most prominent names - have put Swiss architecture on the world map. The younger generation has not yet achieved the same celebrity, but it is striking out in new directions of its own.
 
For the 125th anniversary of the birth of Le Corbusier, swissinfo.ch talked to art historian Lorette Coen about current trends in Swiss architecture. — swissinfo.ch