Meet Emanuel Christ and Christoph Gantenbein, Architecture’s Boy Wonders

Emanuel Christ and Christoph Gantenbein are architecture’s boy wonders—but it took a while for the world to notice.In 2002, at ages 31 and 30, the duo won a competition to expand the Swiss National Museum, a beloved institution in the heart of Zurich. Seven years later they won a second major competition, this time to add a new building to their hometown’s Kunstmuseum Basel, one of the world’s great collections of contemporary art. (In winning the commissions, they beat out the likes of Rem Koolhaas, David Chipperfield, and Zaha Hadid.) With these victories, they were on their way to stardom.

Christoph Gantenbein (left) and Emanuel Christ, photographed for L’Uomo Vogue .

Funding controversies, however, delayed the completion of the Zurich building, which resulted in both projects opening last year. “It was a thrill and, frankly, also a relief,” says Christ of their annus mirabilis. In Zurich they added an 80,000-square-foot thunderbolt of concrete to a fussy 19th-century building. In Basel they produced a gray-brick structure that looks like an alp transported to the city center. Both extensions have won rave reviews. But the architects—who studied together at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology before founding their firm, Christ & Gantenbein, in 1998—are hardly resting on their laurels. The pair spent this past fall teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, which required constant transatlantic travel (and time away from their wives and children). Now they are engaged in projects ranging from social housing in Paris to a visitor center in Zurich for the chocolatemaker Lindt. There they’ll have to manage expectations. As Christ jokes, “People will expect Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

Christ & Gantenbein’s new wing for Zurich’s Swiss National Museum.

Gif by Axel de Stampa