On 14 October 2026 the Gemeinde Meggen announced that “Wassermusik” will replace the 1973 Hallenbad at Schulanlage Hofmatt. The jury’s choice was unanimous. The team behind the codename is Schmid Schärer Architekten ETH SIA of Zürich, with August + Margrith Künzel Landschaftsarchitekten of Binningen and SEFORB of Uster. In the open call, 72 architecture firms applied. The jury prequalified 8, and those 8 submitted anonymously. A municipality, a school, and a jury that read the plans without reading the names: that is the Swiss public competition at its best.

The programme is plain public infrastructure: a 25 m basin with 4 lanes and twice today’s changing rooms. School swimming uses it by day, and clubs and the public use it outside school hours. What won it is quieter. As Baublatt reported, the scheme earned the best energy and sustainability rating of all entries. Above ground the structure is timber, except for the escape stair cores. The basement goes into the excavation the 1973 pool already dug, so little new digging is needed. PV covers most of the roof and facades, there are fewer sealed surfaces, and new trees go in to the south.

Baublatt quotes the jury, via the Gemeinde, praising “die präzise Platzierung des Gebäudes, die gut funktionierenden Grundrisse und den angemessenen Einsatz der Mittel.” The Luzerner Zeitung adds that the project fits “in seiner Grösse und Anordnung gut in die bestehende Schulanlage ein.” Angemessen (appropriate) is a word we would happily hang over our own plotter in the Werkhalle.

A method you can read in the facts

Patrick Schmid and Roger Schärer founded the office in Zürich in 2006. Remo Baumgartner has been a partner since 2017 and Moritz Weber since 2023. The office’s own portrait says competitions are the core of how it gets work, and that it takes on general planning where it can. The portrait also gives its working line: “Wir arbeiten nicht an einer idealisierten Vorstellung der Welt.” (“We do not work on an idealised idea of the world.”) Each project starts from the site, and then either extends it with restraint or reinterprets it radically.

The same thread runs through the built work. The Hunzenschwil secondary school extension took best architects 19 in gold, and the jury noted that the architects “were careful to interpret the existing character of the older school building.” It was built from prefabricated concrete with an earthquake-bracing brick bond and no in-situ concrete. At Lufingen, a school extension with a timber sports hall (best architects 26), the project text says the translucent-panel facade “reduces CO₂ emissions by nearly two-thirds” compared with a glazed facade on aluminium profiles. Meggen takes the idea further: often the most sustainable material on a site is the hole, the wall or the character that is already there.

←TODAY: A 1973 excavation in Meggen becomes the basement of a timber pool chosen unanimously from 72 applicants.
→3012: Every Zürich site is read first as stock: holes, cores and soil are already bought and paid for.
Fulcrum: The cheapest cubic metre in a competition is the one the site already dug for you.

Offices that live from competitions learn this pattern slowly. Most of the grey energy in a scheme is committed in the first week, when the team decides what it is allowed to keep. Reuse has a cost: the old hole fixes the footprint and the depth, so every later plan decision has to fit inside a boundary drawn in 1973. Schmid Schärer turned that constraint into placement, and placement is what the jury praised.

Atelier: For a studio entering anonymous competitions this season, Meggen shows that resource thinking gets scored, not just admired: energy and sustainability were rated across all entries. That changes what belongs in the first sketch meeting. The Monday move: add a one-page “Bestand” sheet to every competition kickoff. It lists the excavation, foundations, structure, trees and soil, each marked keep, reinterpret or remove, before anyone draws massing.

Hack: Count what the site already gives you before you draw a single new wall. If the Gemeinde or a surveyor hands over an IFC of the existing building, IfcOpenShell (the open toolkit Thomas Krijnen started, now maintained by its contributors) totals the reusable parts in seconds:

import ifcopenshell
m = ifcopenshell.open("bestand.ifc")
for t in ("IfcFooting", "IfcPile", "IfcSlab", "IfcWall"):
    print(t, len(m.by_type(t)))

Each count it prints becomes a line on your Bestand sheet: a candidate for reuse rather than a demolition item.

PAZ Takeaway: PAZ can build this inventory into an office’s Archicad template as a Bestand property set with a reuse flag on every existing element. The list written at kickoff then travels into the competition model and survives the leap to the execution model.

All entries go on show at the Gemeindehaus Meggen from 10 to 16 December 2026, with the vernissage on 10 December at 17:00. The vote on the construction credit is expected at the end of 2028. Before your next competition, write down what already exists on the site that your scheme will reuse.

Sources & Further Reading

• Primary: Baublatt: Siegerprojekt für neues Hallenbad in Meggen LU steht fest