Brick as Narrative: Manuel Herz’s Design Process Between Context, Politics, and Participation
By Eleonora De Bac and Ayushi Rai
In the landscape of contemporary architecture, the work of Manuel Herz stands out for a radically contextual approach — one that transforms an apparently simple material such as brick into a powerful narrative device, dense with political, economic, and cultural meaning. Brick, as Herz often suggests, is never merely a construction element; it arrives already embedded with history. “It comes with storytelling.”
Each project developed by the studio begins with rigorous urban research: a careful reading of the physical, social, and political forces that shape a place. For Herz, architecture cannot be detached from the tensions that traverse a territory. To design without acknowledging these forces would produce an architecture that is blind — disconnected from history and from the dynamics that shape everyday life.
The studio’s work spans diverse geographies across Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Yet what connects these projects is not a stylistic signature or a recurring formal language. Instead, what binds them is a method — a process of sustained inquiry. Themes migrate from one project to another, reinterpreted and reassembled each time. Architecture, in this sense, becomes a transversal field of research: a network of ideas rather than a recognizable aesthetic.
Herz also acknowledges a distinctly Swiss influence in his working method: a rigorous control of the project at every scale. Precision, however, must coexist with openness. The unpredictability of the construction site demands flexibility — a balance between control and the willingness to let go. This tension between discipline and release lies at the core of architectural practice.
The Tambacounda Regional Hospital embodies this philosophy. Tradition, modernity, and sustainability converge through the use of local materials and passive climatic strategies. The project poses a fundamental question: how can local sustainability, economic adaptability, and a widespread notion of modernity be reconciled? In Tambacounda, collaboration with a foundation deeply rooted in the territory enabled decisions grounded in lived reality rather than distant management. During a presentation to regional authorities, the political leadership invited the entire hospital staff to voice their opinions. Everyone had a voice. This unexpected moment of direct democracy allowed the project to anchor itself profoundly in its context.
In conversation, Herz framed his design process in an unexpectedly disarming way. When asked about methodology, he responded with a simple yet radical question: Was I having fun? For him, curiosity is not separate from rigor; it is what sustains it. The freedom to experiment, to discover something new each day, creates the conditions for innovation. In a discipline often dominated by analysis and justification, this perspective is refreshing. We often search for layered meaning in projects, becoming hyper-analytical and forgetting that design also emerges from intuition and joy. Sometimes, a simple and honest approach generates the most profound advances.
When asked how he navigates uncertainty — when a project risks failure or does not unfold as expected — his response will stay with us in our journey of being an architect: one must learn to let go. Not every project will succeed, and that is a simple part of the process. It is merely a diversion within a much longer trajectory. Architecture, after all, is not defined by isolated outcomes but by the continuity of exploration.
Through this balance — between narrative and construction, politics and materiality, control and surrender, rigor and play — Herz’s work reveals architecture as both an intellectual and human practice. It is neither purely analytical nor purely poetic, but a discipline that exists precisely in that oscillation.