Practicing beyond

YH: In Switzerland, the recent shift in architectural values seems to be driven by a combination of education, ongoing crises, and the legacy of how our environment has been constructed. After finishing our studies at ETH in Zurich we entered a highly specialised reality where bridging the different fragments feels heavy. These frictions create a sense of urgency—an awareness that, in response to planetary crises and the current condition of space production, architecture needs to be practised differently. 

I would say that two key factors currently shape the architectural landscape in Switzerland: the evolving values brought forward by a younger generation and a competition culture that allows those values to be embedded into practice. Recently, we’ve noticed a change in how architects engage with the world, with their role increasingly transcending traditional disciplinary boundaries. When we talk about the built environment, it’s not just the buildings that architects design. It’s a much larger, either visible or invisible network of forces that we engage with. Companies—such as Amazon and Google—are entering the architectural field, planning cities, road networks, and even designing buildings as if they were technology products. We encounter landscapes, as well as technical infrastructures like data centres. We are surrounded by environments constructed without architects, yet they shape our lived planet just as much. 

A discipline in flux

YH: I think there’s an emerging discourse around understanding these spaces—examining who contributes to shaping our environment, the networks of visible and hidden actors, and how architects can meaningfully participate in that process. Unlike the modern search for a universal solution, we find ourselves in a more complex, irregular time when no single answer is enough. 

A few months ago, we witnessed how the region of Blatten was devastated by a natural catastrophe. Switzerland, often perceived from the outside as safe and stable, is also being reshaped by forces that transcend traditional borders and affect us all. These shifts influence the values and priorities of our engagement with the environment. At the same time, smaller-scale projects and approaches can respond to larger-scale issues. We believe there is no strict division between scales—no project is inherently small or large in its impact. The way we see it, projects are intertwined. 

We see the architect’s role as that of a mediator—not only within disciplinary debates, but also in engaging a broader audience. With our projects, we try to keep things open and hope to give everything the space to resonate.

Between one and two

YH: dorsa + 820 is an architecture practice made of two entities: dorsa and 820. dorsa is me (Yufei He), Pan Hu, and James Horkulak. 820 is Nicolas König and Lewis Horkulak. But the relationship is more complex—Lewis and I live together; Lewis and James are brothers; Lewis, James, and Nicolas are German. Pan and I are Chinese. So it’s hard to categorise into just two divisions. After winning a school competition in Switzerland, we tried to set up a style of collaboration that enables us to continue our research and engage with different forms of realities, and at the same time function as a company in Swiss architecture culture, which required a lot of resources.

One way to describe dorsa + 820 is through the metaphor of a holobiont, an assemblage of multiple species forming one ecological unit that is always adapting itself. Like lichen, which consists of algae and fungus, the parts cannot be separated. A lichen contains three life forms: the lichen itself, the fungus, and the algae. It’s not one, but also not two. We like this kind of complexity. That’s how we see ourselves: not two separate teams, nor a single unified one, but something that is always transforming. 

"dorsa" was a word we found by chance on a map of Mars. It's the plural form of "dorsum" which refers to the shadow side of a geological formation. So it means "all the shadow sides." We loved the idea of the backsides of things, the unseen appearances that form our known, visible world. We’re keen to discover them and give them a certain aesthetic and dignity. It is within this mindset that we wish to practice. 820 comes from the time it takes light to travel from the sun to the Earth: 8 minutes and 20 seconds. This exact moment marks a kind of fragile balance that enables all life forms to exist and sustain themselves on Earth. A time that we all share together. When we decided on the names, we chose separately—but later realised they are quite complementary: the dark and the light side. 

Frictional fictions

YH: We wish to use different media to mediate. Competition projects are part of that. Many people ask, “Okay, you have your research projects on the side - how do you bring that into competition work?” We believe we live in many different realities, each with its own constraints—and competitions are just one of them. Sometimes, when you enter competitions, you have to be a bit more cautious than when working under other conditions. After finishing our studies, we took part in a few radical competitions and quickly realised that this was a very particular reality we were stepping into.

Last year, we won a competition for a school project in Visp titled Sand’. The new building is part of an existing campus originally designed in the early 1970s. In our proposal, we introduced two outdoor volumes that weren’t in the program: the Biotope Tower and the Winter Garden Tower, both intended as spaces for outdoor teaching. By inventing or shifting the program like this, we were able to give the building a distinct expression. For us, radicalism doesn’t come from a particular architectural language, but from the hidden actors you bring into the program or the site.

For another project—probably the smallest competition we’ve entered—called Le Bonhomme, we found ourselves at 2,980 meters in the Val d’Hérens, where the ground on the site sinks each year due to thawing permafrost, and we were mainly drawn to the competition because the site was fascinating: how do you build in a liquid context, in which even the foundation soil changes? Our proposal was a structure supported on three points that can be flexibly adjusted. The building thus balances like a rower on flowing ground, centred around a gabion core filled with local stones released by the melting permafrost. We wanted to make the transforming environment an integral part of the construction. 

In 2024, for a garden show in Lausanne, we placed a mobile, speculative forest on a large car park near the lake, where no plants can naturally grow. We didn't want to just exhibit real plants for a few months and then have everything thrown away, that felt very absurd to us. For the speculative forest, we introduced four tree types, all migrating species.

In Switzerland, there’s a specific way people visualise future buildings: when a new building is planned, markers are placed to show the future outline. This allows neighbours to see it and, if they disagree, they can file an objection. It’s a kind of legal tool for participation. We used that same language to shape our speculative trees. We built them on wheels, so people could move them around. Kids ended up blocking cars with the trees, and the next morning the city got complaints from drivers. They asked us to chain the trees to the ground. So, we had to tie them up. But that’s also part of the story. The moment fiction enters the city, there’s friction. And we’re really interested in that—when different realities collide and create a new kind of aesthetic.

Invasive imaginaries

YH: One of our recent projects is Migrating Palm. It was the quickest we’ve completed, yet it reached a wide audience. Last year, the Swiss government published a black list of invasive species introducing about 40 plants. It aims to prevent the spread of non-native organisms within Switzerland. One of them was the palm, which was one of the 4 protagonists of our speculative forest in Lausanne. The palm entered southern Switzerland around 200 years ago as a gift from England. At the time exotic plants were collected by plant hunters around the globe. Today, in Ticino, you see it everywhere—in every postcard, it has become part of the so-called Swiss identity. People even call it the Ticino Palm. With climate change, the tree line rises roughly 100 meters per degree of warming and moves from south to north. Before the law came into effect, we brought a palm to a Swiss glacier—just to let the two meet: the melting glacier and the climbing palm. When we brought the palm up there, in one of the most touristic sites in Switzerland, people had mixed reactions. Some were angry—like, “This doesn’t belong here.” Others took endless selfies. There was this strange mix of denial and fascination.

But that’s the thing—we don’t know if the future is good or bad. It’s open, seeking empathy. And this image—a palm on a glacier—could also be from the past. Palms were present in Switzerland before, during the last ice age. Biology uses categories like “native” and “invasive,” but these lines are never clear. We, as humans, just tend to put everything into categories—to measure our world and to organise our society. Every measurement tells a story, and we like to ask: what’s behind those stories? What’s the fiction inside the system? That’s also how we started. In 2019, after finishing our studies, we got a travel scholarship. The previous grantee travelled to classical cities, like a modern version of the Grand Tour, to study architecture. But we decided not to do that. We are instead drawn to the overlooked sides of cities—to landscapes that blur the boundaries between the natural and the artificial.

Embracing change

YH: I think we’re facing a world full of shifts and chaos, where we constantly move between many realities. I hope we can become more professional without losing the naivety with which we entered architecture, and the hope for the “generalism” that carried us out of our studies. There will inevitably be conflicts. What language do we use to communicate? How do we transform our models of life into something that belongs to a completely different realm of reality? I believe that, as mediators, we can only confront this changing world by jumping back and forth, by flying in circles, not just always moving forward.