Choosing the periphery

MV: We are in La Chaux-de-Fonds, near the French border and the Swiss city of Neuchâtel. It’s a somewhat peripheral area, with less pressure on rents and on the built environment in general. In fact, the city is often seen as problematic: financial magazines describe it as unattractive, with high taxes. Yet the cost of living here is actually very low. Housing is easy to find, and renting office space is straightforward—something refreshing after living in big cities where you have to fight for every square metre. In 2009, the city was also added to the UNESCO World Heritage list, which makes renovations more complicated. Owners must comply with strict preservation guidelines while also meeting modern energy standards. Finding ways to care for UNESCO-protected buildings while adapting them to contemporary needs. This is the theme of my ongoing postgraduate final thesis for a MAS (Master of Advanced Studies) in Energy and Sustainable Development in the Built Environment. It is entitled: Empower UNESCO: A Roadmap for 2050.

Foundations and encounters

MV: After high school, I didn’t start as an architect but as an engineer-designer—a profession that’s actually quite tailored to our region, especially for watchmaking. It’s a profile where you learn both how to build a watch and how to design it—combining aesthetic and technical skills. During that preparatory year, we had mostly practical courses: watchmaking, mechanics, electronics. Only two hours a week were devoted to theory. The teacher—who was deeply passionate about architecture—kept showing us projects. That’s when I realised I wanted to pursue architecture instead.

So, I quit that school and started studying at the EPFL in Lausanne. After two years, I went on an exchange to Zurich, followed by an internship in Geneva with Made In. Later, I moved to the U.S. to study at Harvard, which was a completely different environment than what I had known in the EPF of Lausanne and Zurich —very academic, very theoretical. That was the first semester of my Master’s. I finished my degree with Tom Emerson from 6A.

Emerson’s approach still resonates with me: starting by observing a place, conducting careful surveys, noticing the people, plants, animals—everything alive around a site—before even beginning to design. We had an amazing team of assistants, especially Thomasine Wolfensberger, in whose office I worked after my diploma. I was then invited by Peter Swinnen—a Belgian architect and co-founder of Crit.—to help set up his chair as a guest professor at ETH. So I left practice for academia. That gave me the financial stability to begin my own practice, Marginalia. With Peter, I learned how an architect can be a kind of "policy whisperer"—someone who influences the political framework before a brief is written. 

After two years, I moved to the chair of Prof. Dr. Laurent Stalder. It was an incredible privilege to be part of his team at ETH and to engage with architecture from the perspective of history and theory.

Marginalia

MV: Marginalia is a Latin word meaning side notes, or side drawings—something you do in the margins when reading a text. Edgar Allan Poe did a transcript of all the notes he had written in the margins of his books, compiled into a single volume called Marginalia. There are also famous examples of marginalia in mathematics, where theorems started out as side notes and later became significant in their own right, like Fermat’s Last Theorem.

So for me, marginalia represents a way of starting from something anecdotal, something in the periphery, and allowing it to grow into something more important. It connects to our location as well—being in the margins geographically, on the periphery. It may begin as a small comment, but if it's meaningful, it can evolve. Lastly, I didn’t want the office to bear my own name. I see architecture as inherently collective. We use the pronoun “we,” even though I was alone at the start. I wanted everyone in the office to feel part of something shared—not working for a single person but contributing to a group.

House calls

MV: My interest in preservation and heritage was there from the start, but being in La Chaux-de-Fonds allowed it to grow. All the architecture I’d seen before was bold, surprising, innovative. Meanwhile, what I was doing felt more like being a “doctor” for buildings—quietly diagnosing, figuring out what was wrong, and trying to help—without dramatic gestures.

Sometimes you don’t need massive interventions—sometimes it's about accompanying buildings into a new era. That doesn't mean there’s no place for bold moves—sometimes they’re necessary. But often, the best response is quiet, respectful. Today, we try to have a dialogue with the existing context—sometimes to the point where you wouldn't even notice an architect intervened. This approach is influenced, in a way, by manufacturing. Once, a senior engineer in the watchmaking industry told me: “You change something only if the change produces an improvement—not only for making a change for change’s sake.” This has stayed with me ever since. 

In architecture, there’s long been this drive to reinvent everything, to always do something new. But now I ask: if something works, if people like it, if it’s well done—why change it? We can also honour the past. If something built by previous generations still holds value, we can keep it, support it, and sustain it. There’s no need for constant reinvention. Working in a protected context forces you to have a careful look before doing anything. You can’t just show up at a site and start designing. You first have to ask: What is there? What are its qualities? Why is it protected? Is it still as good as it claims to be? So before you even think about the program, you're already engaging with a rich, existing identity.

Of course, it comes with regulations—but there’s also a lot of grey area, which provides space for experimentation. And I think the authorities are aware that, if we want these cities to stay alive, we can’t freeze them in time. We have to bring these UNESCO-protected environments into a new chapter. The real question is how, because you can’t just ask people to live like it’s the 19th century. They have new expectations—comfort, performance, sustainability—and it's a huge challenge to reinterpret historical buildings considering that.

A question of proportionality

MV: As for grey zones and experimentation—this time in the field of re-use—we’re currently working on a very concrete case: a large mansion purchased by two families to be converted into two flats. Technically, the zoning would allow them to demolish the house and build multi-story flat blocks. But instead, they chose to preserve it. We had an oak door from the original building. It doesn’t meet current energy standards—but instead of throwing it out, we proposed reusing it as one of the new entrances. If you just read the law, the door should go to a landfill. But we went to the Canton and explained its value, its character. And they agreed to let us keep it. No certification required. It’s a small detail, but it represents the kind of battles we fight at the office. These micro-decisions, these negotiations, are where our principles play out. It’s not about heroism—it’s about quietly asking, “Can we do better by doing less?”

Sometimes, the situation is so critical that it requires in-depth intervention. We worked on a project called Uplift in collaboration with the Zurich-based office COMTE/MEUWLY. It involved an old farm in La Sagne, a nearby rural area. The kitchen was a very unattractive space—dark, not ventilated, and with a low ceiling.

The question was how to bring it up to modern standards—not only functionally, but also in terms of spatial quality. The kitchen was located at the heart of the farm. This typology was common in old farmhouses: a central, introverted core where people would gather in winter around the warmth. But by definition, these spaces are closed off and dark. So we introduced steel, polycarbonate, and glass to bring in light, air, and height. We preserved all the existing wooden structure, which was still in good condition, and integrated a new steel structure on top of it. Sometimes, minimal intervention is enough; sometimes, it’s not. And in such cases, we’re not afraid to use contemporary materials to support and enhance the space.   

The city as new ground

MV: There’s a new-build project that’s interesting because it diverges slightly from what we’ve discussed so far. It’s a housing block with 24 units, built from scratch. An existing building —which was actually quite good but only had eight units— had to be demolished to make space for this one. Even though this is a new build, we tried to approach it with the same mindset we apply to renovation. That means starting by asking: What is the site's identity? What makes it unique? How can we design the new structure as a continuation of what already exists? This reflects a strong belief we hold in the office: Even when you build something new, the site already contains layers of meaning, structure, and memory. There is never a “blank page.” There is always context. 

We were brought in mid-way by a general contractor. They had trouble getting a building permit. The city kept rejecting the proposal. So, they reached out to us, asking us to work within the same overall volume, but we were otherwise free to reimagine the project. Well—“free” as much as one can be in this context. Construction costs are relatively consistent across Switzerland, but the rents you can charge in Neuchâtel are much lower than in Zurich or Geneva. So, we had to design an architecture that is economically efficient and straightforward. This aspect actually interested us: working with a client who placed strong emphasis on cost was a valuable training ground. It forces you to learn what’s truly cost-effective, what isn't, and how to design smartly within limitations. 

We ultimately got the permit by sticking closely to the neighbourhood’s typology. On that street, due to its steep slope, buildings are typically accessed via bridges—creating a gap between the street and the building. We used this typology, but also turned it into an opportunity. We introduced five townhouses on the ground level (the basement from the street perspective), each with direct access to a garden. That’s quite rare in the city centre. Above those, we designed standard flats, and on the top floor, attic flats of slightly higher standard. With this mix of typologies, our goal was to attract a variety of residents while taking advantage of the building’s very particular relationship to the street and the site. Sharing the existing parking ramp from the neighbouring plot allowed us to fully capitalise on the site’s potential. 

Looking at a site carefully is not only about birds and trees; it can also be about parking ramps and access bridges. After all, we see the city as the new ground—something to be composed with.