Philippe Block of ETH Zurich’s Block Research Group spoke at a PAZ Central BSS TALK in April 2023. He named Heinz Isler and Félix Candela as his models and summed up their method in one line: pick one system and keep pushing it for decades. He was talking about shells. A cooperative in Zurich Kreis 3 has been doing the same with an office since 1998.

This summer that office put its system into its name. On 9 July 2026, pool relaunched its website with a short notice: pool Architekten becomes pool Architektur, “almost the same name”. According to the commercial register, the change from “pool Architekten Genossenschaft” to “pool Architektur Genossenschaft” was entered on 15 September 2026, together with an updated statement of purpose. The plural noun for the people is gone. The discipline stays on the door.

A practice built as a Genossenschaft

pool was registered as a cooperative on 14 September 1998 by eight founding partners: Dieter Bachmann, Raphael Frei, Mathias Heinz, Philipp Hirtler, David Leuthold, Andreas Sonderegger, Mischa Spoerri and Matthias Stocker. Its office page puts the principle plainly, “Vielfalt und Dialog sind wichtiger als Namen” (diversity and dialogue matter more than names), and counts more than 500 projects made that way.

According to the 2014 Prix Meret Oppenheim publication, in an interview by Thomas Kramer, Bachmann described the founders as eight fairly conventional people who happened to find each other. Sonderegger explained that income from teaching, juries and other outside work goes into a shared pot and is split evenly. Heinz said that no partner, himself included, is indispensable. The same publication describes a mandatory weekly poolatelier where all the partners critique the projects, with usually two lead partners per project.

That arrangement has a cost: a crit with every partner present takes hours every week, and agreement takes longer than one signature. In return, succession, the issue that rewrites the name on many Swiss office doors, works differently here. The cooperative owns the practice, so partners can change, in the office’s words “Namen und Gesichter”, without a buy-out. The register now lists 13 people in the cooperative’s administration.

←TODAY: A Zurich cooperative with more than 500 projects has dropped even the plural “Architekten” from its name. →3012: Offices are known by their method, and partners come and go without the method changing. Fulcrum: A practice lasts when its knowledge stays in the room after any single person has left.

What the method built this summer

On 14 July 2026 the temporary Hotel Lauchernalp won a best architects 27 award: about 2,000 m up, three storeys, 19 rooms, up to 64 guests. It was built in timber elements with a high degree of prefabrication, ceiling and wall elements plus fully fitted wet-cell modules. Planning and completion took 105 working days; the building work ran from August to December 2025.

On 18 August the Canton of Zurich opened the Dübendorf branch of the Kantonsschule Stadelhofen on the Empa-Eawag campus, the same site as Block’s HiLo unit on NEST. According to the canton’s press release, the school uses about 250 timber modules, cost CHF 47 million, took 15 months to build and is designed to be dismantled and moved after about 30 years. Bauart Architekten und Planer AG designed the school building and Blumer Lehmann AG built it, with module fitters and joiners whose work made that schedule possible. pool designed the sports halls, winners of the Canton of Zurich Architecture Prize 2025 and built to Minergie-A-Eco.

Both projects work the way the office does: repeatable parts, designed to come apart, shared authorship. Since 2019, loop at Weststrasse 118 has opened the office to the neighbourhood with exhibitions, forums and lunch tables.

Atelier: For a studio like ours, pool offers a habit any office can adopt without the legal structure. From the late 2070s, the offices that struggled were the ones whose knowledge left with every Praktikant or partner. Monday move: block one fixed hour a week where every live project goes on the wall, with two named leads each.

Hack: Find every project that has gone a week without a crit, before Friday arrives. With a simple crit log in your project-controlling database, one query writes the pin-up list.

SELECT p.project_no, p.lead_a, p.lead_b, MAX(c.crit_date) AS last_crit
FROM projects p LEFT JOIN crit_log c ON c.project_no = p.project_no
WHERE p.status = 'active'
GROUP BY p.project_no, p.lead_a, p.lead_b
HAVING MAX(c.crit_date) IS NULL OR MAX(c.crit_date) < CURRENT_DATE - 7;

Every row is a project only its two leads have seen lately. Pin those up first.

PAZ Takeaway: Make the weekly all-office pin-up your own. Keep it a fixed hour, put every project on the wall, and keep a simple record of what was said. That record becomes the office’s shared authorship, and it costs nothing to run.

Put the hour in the calendar before the next competition claims it.