![]() “They all have a sort of textile feeling-waves, or noodles, or stretched metal,” she says, indicating the perforated black exterior of a decorative-arts complex built on the footprint of four of the original factory sheds. “In some ways, we’re re-dressing the buildings,” Baier-Bischofberger muses. (Currently on view is a solo show of the Spanish artist Miquel Barceló.) A sinewy cast-concrete lattice weaves a wavy pattern over the glass outer walls of Bischofberger’s gallery, which recently relocated from central Zurich. “The idea,” Baier explains, “was to make hard materials look soft, as a cushion for protecting something of value.” Each of the five handsome buildings completed so far achieves that effect in a different way. Lit up at night, the knobs create the illusion of floating rings. In daylight, it resembles “petrified bubble wrap,” as the architects like to think of it. ![]() The building connects through a stately passage to Noppenhalle, a magisterial exhibition hall, named for the nubby concrete protuberances aligned in an ornamental grid on its facade. “We’re playing on classic elements of architecture,” Baier-Bischofberger says. Its ground-floor exhibition space opens to the interior square through a cathedral-like exterior colonnade formed by what Baier, 42, calls pappardelle-thin, flat, steel-reinforced pillars that twist as if they were coming out of a pasta machine. Nonetheless, it is a very glamorous hallway, an incomparably serene white corridor traversing 16 storage rooms on the second story of an enormous poured-concrete building. Still, his daughter recalls, “my father was so surprised when he came here, and said, ‘But this is so beautiful!’ ” And he was just talking about a hallway. Among these are significant quantities of ceramic and glass sculptures (by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Lucio Fontana), several libraries’ worth of books, and the best work from every artist he has represented, including Jasper Johns, Gerhard Richter, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. She and Baier also knew better than to design anything that would compete with the collections that Bischofberger has amassed with his wife, Christina (known as Yoyo). She apprenticed with Sottsass as a teenager and holds undergraduate degrees in both architecture and civil engineering from MIT. He could have had his pick of starchitects, but Bischofberger recognized that Nina, now 40 and the middle of his three daughters, is a can-do type. “He always wants more, more, more.” She and Baier have given him just that, by turning the factory site in suburban Männedorf into a spectacular complex with a dozen bespoke buildings surrounding a landscaped central plaza. “My father is a hoarder,” Baier-Bischofberger declares. “Working with family, there’s an inherent level of trust.” “It’s natural to give a project like this to your daughter and son-in-law,” Bischofberger says of his decision to hire Baier Bischofberger Architects, the 10-year-old Zurich firm established by Nina Baier-Bischofberger and her husband, Florian Baier. That presented him with a new problem: how to reimagine enormous halls built for the manufacture of hydraulic lifts as suitable spaces for the storage and display of his countless, one-of-a kind holdings? To solve them, he started buying up the 250,000-square-foot campus of a former factory on the outskirts of Zurich. ![]() Such were the problems facing the Swiss art dealer Bruno Bischofberger, a willful, even obsessive, collector for nearly all of his 75 years. Where do you put them? And what’s to be done when you also own the world’s most extensive private collection of furniture by Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Frank Lloyd Wright, Eileen Gray, Jean Prouvé, and every other important modern and contemporary designer? You don’t get much pleasure from keeping it all in storage, but one has room for only so many chairs in an Ettore Sottsass house. Say you have 400 decoratively painted wooden cabinets in your possession.
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