Still, even as they begin to make it in the world as a bona fide architectural firm it’s interesting to see a sort of mistrust of the architect label remain. In a brief chat at the end of the lecture she professes she stumbled upon architecture almost by accident. Elsewhere I’ve read she steadily avoided the field to spite her parents yet it seems to have nonetheless stealthily drawn her in which is perhaps why she appears to approach each of the projects she illustrated with a note of wariness – even a kind of underlying scorn. The latter is well illustrated in the firm’s Blur Building for the 2002 Swiss Expo. Pushing ephemerality (a word architects never seem to tire of) to its natural conclusion they created a building out of fog whose most tangible effect on its inhabitants would be a light dewy mist on their skin. There’s something so utterly ironic and at the same time so arresting about the idea of a building made of fog. It seems the work of a medieval court trickster, enlisting an army of cloud engineers to conjure up a subtle and transient magic. It’s the opposite of everything an architect stands for - four walls and a door blasted wide of its hinges.
