Bearth & Deplazes

The “intelligent” building is usually taken to mean a building with a high degree of technologisation, ingenious mechanics, advanced apparatus. In fact, however, it is the concept that must be intelligent, a concept that optimises expenditure and yield. The school in Vella, the work of Valentin Bearth and Andrea Deplazes, is an example of a solution which is thoroughly progressive, a solution based not on an accumulation of technological tricks but on the absence — the “leaving out” — of the usual building components, and on the combination and concentration of the important parameters to single elements.