On 22 June 2026, Kanton Zug announced the winner of its open two-stage competition for the new Kantonsschule Rotkreuz. The winning scheme is «discentia», by Gigon Guyer Partner Architekten AG of Zurich with Ghisleni Partner AG of Rapperswil. The competition drew 70 concept submissions, and 12 teams went through to the second stage. The brief calls for 44 classes and about 880 students, and construction is set to start in late 2028. Baudirektor Florian Weber opened his statement plainly: «Das Siegerprojekt überzeugt in mehrfacher Hinsicht.» On 2 July 2026 the canton put all the entries on public view at the Kantonsschule Zug, Lüssiweg 24.

The announcement came just before this autumn’s reporting window. It belongs on our desk because of what the same office published in the same year.

The canton’s own description shows a clear two-part plan. A higher head building faces the centre of Rotkreuz and holds the public spaces and the gymnasium. A lower eastern wing, which holds the classrooms, runs parallel to the sports fields. Above ground the structure is timber-hybrid, with unsealed surfaces and shade trees around it. In the Luzerner Zeitung on 23 June 2026, Tobias Söldi put the cost at about CHF 200 million and reminded Zug readers that this is the office behind Zurich’s Prime Tower.

The competition habit

Annette Gigon and Mike Guyer founded the practice in Zurich in 1989. The office describes itself without ornament: «Most of our completed buildings resulted from successful competition entries.» Few Swiss offices put it that directly, and every office that lives on the Wettbewerb knows what the sentence costs. Christian Maggioni and Stefan Thommen have been partners since November 2024. Since January 2026 the associates have been Ivana Beljan, Matthias Clivio, Urs Meyer and Pieter Rabijns. They are the people who carry a stage-two entry through the nights the jury report never mentions, and their names belong in the story.

An open competition with 70 entries is a gift to a public client and an unpaid bet for most of the offices that enter it. That cost belongs to the procurement system, not to the teams. What makes an office able to keep placing that bet for 37 years is a method it can repeat.

The method, made public

In March 2026, Annette Gigon, Mike Guyer and Arend Kölsch released Haus, Energie und CO2. Ein Handbuch and presented it on 28 April. It is unusual for a practice to do this. It is the climate literacy Gigon taught as a professor at ETH Zurich from 2012 to 2023, now written down as an office’s own way of working.

The practice statement came three years earlier. In a swissinfo interview published on 29 July 2023, Gigon said: «Es nützt auch nichts, Stahlbeton zu verteufeln» (demonising reinforced concrete does not help either). Her reasoning was that wood also needs energy to process, and forests cannot replace concrete one-for-one. She also said that 20–30 cm of insulation, a heat pump and PV bring operational emissions down to about a quarter. Read the Rotkreuz scheme with that sentence in mind. Timber-hybrid is a calculated choice, not a dogmatic one. The method came before the material.

The office’s own news page also lists two of its houses on the Open House Zürich weekend of 26 September: the Wohnhaus in Küsnacht and the art centre on the Löwenbräu-Areal. That listing is our only source for it, so take it as a quiet postscript. It fits the year: a practice opening its method and its rooms.

←TODAY: A Zurich office wins an 880-student school and publishes its CO2 method as a handbook in the same year.
→3012: The practices still standing are the ones whose method outlived every partner and every Praktikant.
Fulcrum: A method that is written down can be taught, and only a method that can be taught can be repeated.

Atelier: Most 10–20-person offices run competitions out of memory. Who freezes the model, when the CO2 check happens and who writes the jury text are all things people simply know. Once an AI tool starts drafting the Erläuterungsbericht, it can only repeat what the office has written down. Monday move: open one file and write your competition method, from brief to submission, on a single page.

Hack: Version that page the way you version the model, so every entry ships against a known edition of your method. Write METHOD.md first, then run:

git init wettbewerb-method && cd wettbewerb-method
git add METHOD.md && git commit -m "Competition method v1"
git tag entry-2026-10
git log --oneline --decorate METHOD.md

Each tag ties a submission to the method that produced it.

PAZ Takeaway: Write down your own studio’s competition method on one page and keep it. That page is also what PAZ-GPT can read back to the next person who joins the team, so the habit stays in the office when people leave.

Write the page, tag it, and let the next entry ship against it.