Valerio Olgiati

It analyses the societal currents of the early 21st century and argues that those currents are radically different from the epoch of postmodernity.

The book proposes a new framework for architecture and defines the seven underlying principles for non-referential architecture: 1) experience of space; 2) oneness; 3) newness; 4) construction; 5) contradiction; 6) order; 7) sensemaking.

One of the hallmarks of non-referential architecture, according to Olgiati, is that each building exists for itself.

Each building is governed by an architectural idea – and that idea has to be form-generative and sense-making.

"Non-referential architecture denotes but it refuses to explain or narrate and it leaves behind any vestiges of a theatrical mode of persuasion and propagation."

Valerio Olgiati (born 1958) is a Swiss architect.

He initially studied architecture at ETH Zurich, a public research university in Zurich, Switzerland.

Olgiati was well-known for constructing the School Building in Paspels in 1998 and the Yellow House Museum in Flims in 1999.

Other recognized buildings by him include the House for the Musician/Atelier Bardill in Scharans, the Villa Além in Alentejo, the UNESCO World Heritage Bahrain Pearling Trail Visiting Center in Muharraq, and the Baloise Insurance Building in Basel.

Olgiati holds a professorship at the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio since 2002.

This shift away from basing architecture on any kind of referentiality found its early theoretical form in his Iconographic Autobiography, first published in 2006.

The Iconographic Autobiography is an anthology of 55 illustrations.

The Iconographic Autobiography foreshadows non-referential architecture in as much as it points to references, yet these references are not meaningful.

Olgiati has said that he believes that only basic insight from the experience of space is able to move architecture of the present time within its highly heterogeneous society.

Valerio Olgiati operates his architecture office with his wife Tamara and his staff in Portugal and Switzerland.

Among other venues, his work has been the subject of single exhibitions at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, and at the Former Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City.

Olgiati has held various teaching appointments, among them the Kenzo Tange Chair at Harvard University, at ETH Zürich, at Cornell University and at the AA in London.

In 2014, Breitschmid publishes a rebuttal titled "Architektur leitet sich von Architektur ab" (Architecture is Derived from Architecture) in the Swiss journal Werk, Bauen + Wohnen, thereby responding to an architectural claim made by others that attempts to imbue meaning into architecture from the extra-architectural, such as the economic, ecological, political.

Architect Christian Kerez investigated the limits of referentiality and speaks of "non-referential space" as a quality of his contribution for the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2016.

In the same year, architect Peter Eisenman points out that architecture has been moving toward a non-referential objectivity for some time, in as much as architectural form is increasingly reduced “to a pure reality.”

Olgiati calls his work "non-referential architecture", the title of a 2018 treatise by Olgiati and architectural theoretician Markus Breitschmid about the social purpose of architecture for the people of the 21st century.

Olgiati and Breitschmid write that "non-referential architecture is not an architecture that subsists as a referential vessel or as a symbol of something outside itself. Non-referential buildings are entities that are themselves meaningful and sense-making and, as such, no less the embodiment of society than buildings were in the past when they were the bearers of common social ideals."

The first documented use of the term "non-referential" in architecture appears in a reprint of an interview between Olgiati and Breitschmid in the Italian architecture journal Domus.

In 2018, Olgiati and Breitschmid published the architectural treatise Non-Referential Architecture.

Describing the intent of the exhibition ‘Inscriptions: Architecture before Speech’, held at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design in 2018, K. Michael Hays argues that today’s architecture presupposes “not a particular meaning, but a specific kind of potentiality — a non-semantic materiality, a non-referential construct that can be developed into an actual architectural project.”

Olgiati mentioned that the most important step for his formation as an architect was his temporary emigration to Los Angeles, and not his upbringing in a specific culture, country, or landscape nor was it his architectural education.

According to Olgiati, living in the radically heterogeneous United States of America allowed him to begin to understand the world in formal and natural terms and not in symbolic and historical terms.