Nestled in a verdant valley between the mighty Alps and the calm of Lake Constance, St. Gallen is famed for its abbey—now a UNESCO World Heritage site—around which the town grew up. During the Reformation, there was a split, the townsfolk turning Protestant while the monks remained Catholic. Later, St. Gallen became an important center for textiles—indeed, it was to ensure the future of its machine-embroidery industry that, in the 1890s, the town council founded an “academy of commerce, transportation, and administration” that afterward became the University of St. Gallen (USG). Though embroidery declined after World War I, the university flourished and is today considered the most prestigious business school in Germanophone Europe. In 2015, with a growing number of students, it was feeling the squeeze on its existing campuses (it has three: two in town and the main one on the slopes above), and began thinking about a new building. But this wouldn’t be your usual classroom block—rather, a “space for our future leaders, where new forms of learning and teaching can be developed and implemented,” as Charlotte Strohm, USG’s communications officer, explains.
“At the time of the design competition, in 2017, the program was relatively vague,” says Marie de France, head of Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto’s Paris office (it beat seven other firms for the job, among them Grafton, Lacaton & Vassal, and Christ & Gantenbein). “Instead of the usual super-detailed Swiss specifications, we were given three concepts: the railroad station—the idea you can walk in and immediately orient yourself; the workshop—open, flexible spaces; and the cloister—a place of promenade for thinking aloud.” Located on the crest of a hill at one end of USG’s main campus, close to Bruno Gerosa’s introverted library (1986–89) and Förderer and Otto’s splendidly Brutalist building (1957–63), the greenfield site faced early 20th-century brick houses out front and a community garden at the back. But it was not from these that Fujimoto took his cues, instead seeking a design that would stand out from the existing university structures while adhering to their spatial lineage. In contrast to their brooding stone and concrete, he chose the “lightness” of glass: using a generous 33- by 33-foot module—“a grid of open interpretation from which an organic growth may emerge,” as his competition blurb tree-huggingly spun it—he built up a small three-story hill of slick vitreous boxes that manages to appear at once banal and rather startling in its heterogeneous context.
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