This episode, we travel to Zurich, Switzerland, to meet Pablo Donet, who together with Tim Schäfer and Tanja Reimerfounded Donet Schäfer Reimer Architekten (DOSCRE) in 2018.
Their work doesn’t begin with a manifesto. “It’s not about dogmas,” they say. “It’s things we find out by doing things.” Drawing becomes a way of thinking. “Only by drawing, and drawing and drawing again, you suddenly see something, and then you work on it.” Nothing is invented in isolation; everything is tested, evaluated, adapted.
Housing is their main field of experimentation. Project after project, typologies multiply rather than stabilise. What some might call constraints become productive triggers: “we try to take the full potential out of these limitations.”
Multiplicity is not a weakness but a strategy. “We always fail to choose one image that transports the whole project, there is too much multiplicity.” Columns, windows, colours, plans: differentiation allows architecture to absorb contradictions instead of resolving them too quickly.
They speak of naivety as a tool, of identity elements as ways to compensate for what housing often lacks, and of Zurich as a place that appears progressive yet remains deeply conservative.
“We don’t have a language yet,” they admit. “Sometimes I wish we had.”
Perhaps the work lives precisely in that unresolved space.
Guests: Pablo Donet, DOSCRE (Zurich, Switzerland)
Host: Ana Catarina Silva (Porto, Portugal)
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