Swiss Architecture

Our social responsibility programming has helped not just the general well-being of the community but is correlated with the retention and upward mobility of contracted workers. As an example, after discovering her passion for photography through our programming, domestic worker colleague Brenda Belaza co-taught a course for the community on photography and inclusion. The course explored the intersection of inclusion using photography as a tool for visual storytelling. In addition, Ms Belaza delivered a guest lecture to NYUAD students heading to the Philippines on cultural guidelines and helpful phrases in her native language, Tagalog.

Another of our security guards started a non-profit campaign to rebuild the infrastructure of his town in Pakistan. We have had colleagues who have asked if they can take used textbooks to their home countries. We have colleagues teaching professional development and language courses. Initiatives like these have strengthened the fabric of our institution because it helps create dialogue, mutual respect, and unity.

In any well-being or education outreach, our biggest learning is how we think about how to communicate, and whether the terminology translates to different languages and cultures. Are we creating agency for colleagues to let us know what is helpful for them and what they would like to see?

To be truly effective, resources need to be created with our colleagues. This means connecting through vulnerability, leading by example, and making sure that the values of our institution come alive in the work that we do.

A supportive work culture is at the heart of creating a positive, healthy work environment. This is good for the values of an organisation, and it is vital to serving the needs of our wider community in uncertain times.

If the architecture of mid 20th century Switzerland was characterised by those who saw themselves as authors writing sequels to Le Corbusier’s concrete poetry, then Mario Botta was the iconoclast, ripping up pages and penning them anew. For Botta, who was the featured artist at the La Prairie pavilion at the 2018 edition of Art Basel in Miami Beach, the Swiss landscape is an obstacle to be surmounted, and a canvas on which to project fantasies which provide stark contrast and glorious harmony side by side. Throughout his highly-lauded career, he has demonstrated vision and mastery over inhospitable and inaccessible locations, opening them up in a celebration of manpower, design, and appreciation of Switzerland’s most beautiful vistas.

A recently completed project, the Fiore di Pietra restaurant, is a man-made blossom perched perilously upon a mountain pass. With its obtuse angles and sharp lines, it’s an unmistakable product of 21st century Swiss architecture and engineering. However, thanks to a form inspired by the most basic shapes of nature, that playful sense of contrast and cohesion remains breathtakingly intact. While Botta’s buildings are unmistakably modernist, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that they eschew the slick, sleek, and seamless lines of many of his contemporaries. By favouring masonry over glass and steel, his works have an elemental quality. No matter how vividly creations such as Fiore di Pietra may seem to contrast against the white snow or glacial ice, there is invariably a sense of the mountain, of the river, and of the quarry in Botta’s creations, and in this, an inescapable sense of the Swiss, as well.

La Prairie