Miroslav Sik: And Now the Ensemble!

And Now the Ensemble! is intended as a challenge to architects, their clients, and commissioning authorities to understand and create urban development as a dynamic and collective work of art; in short, to make dialogue central to design. Design, atmosphere, and use can make every new building relate to its local surroundings. As a design process, this contextual expansion does not simply imitate the urban pattern, but interprets what is already there, to some extent modernizes it, makes the familiar alien by employing unusual atmospheric imagery, and ultimately transforms the accumulated chaos of soloists into an orchestrated whole. Miros lav Sik, born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1953, is a Swiss architect, architectural theorist, and professor in the architecture department at the ETH in Zrich.