Working at...

Mexico City will be the World Design Capital in 2018. For the duration of a year, lectures, events and exhibitions in the Mexican capital will focus on sustainable industrial design. Jan Müller is already on site. Since May 2015, the graduate from TU Braunschweig has been working in the studio of the industrial designer Héctor Esrawe. For approximately 25 years, Esrawe has successfully been implementing concepts for interior design and furniture. Jan Müller offers us a glimpse into Esrawe’s office and the metropolis of Mexico City.

Schenker Salvi Weber – founded in 2009 – is a still young, highly ambitious architectural office. In their branches in Vienna and Bern, Andres Schenker, Michael Salvi and Thomas Weber have in the meanwhile more than 25 employees. In 2013, Martin Maidl, at the time a student of architecture at TU Dresden, applied for a traineeship at Schenker Salvi Weber. This internship resulted in a job as a freelance collaborator and a change of universities to TU Wien.

Whenever the name Studio Fuksas is mentioned, striking major international projects pop up in the mind’s eye: Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport, the Georges Frêche school of hotel management in Montpellier, the new Milan exhibition grounds or the Tbilisi Public Service Hall in Georgia. Hardly any other Italian architectural office is as international as Fuksas. Julius Lutterbüse recently did an internship at the head office in Rome. In AIT, the architecture student at Stuttgart University tells about how work is done there.

“When we talk about black panthers, other people think of predators. But we of the untamed dangerous nature of architecture. When we talk about jumping whales, others think of dinosaurs. But we about the flying of 30 tons in weight …” The visions of Coop Himmelb(l)au take shape and become manifest in unconventional major projects such as the Musée des Confluences in Lyon. This year, the non-conformist Viennese architectural office turned 50! Marco Feil completed an internship there.

Non-bureaucratic, open, citizen-centred and service-oriented: We had presented the town hall in Deventer in the Netherlands in AIT 12/2016. In this project, “public” was thought-about in a new way. The planners from Atelier Pro had been in charge of the remarkable concept of interior design. Hannah Wehrle, who recently completed a traineeship there, can readily confirm the commitment of the The Hague architects to the public-social sector. She was allowed to work on numerous projects – the ones shown here and others as well.

Kubota & Bachmann Architects – that means Toshihiro Kubota, Yves Bachmann and Francisco Martinez. A Japanese, a Swiss and a Spaniard. Before going freelance, they worked in extremely renowned international offices – at Jean Nouvel, Shigeru Ban and OMA. In 2011, Toshihiro Kubota and Yves Bachmann founded their joint studio in Paris; one year later, Francisco Martinez joined them. Marie Menninger, architecture student at TU Dresden, completed an internship in this office.

pool Architekten in Zurich stand for more than 30 years of competition-, architectural-, office- and discussion culture. The architectural office founded and headed by eight partners covers a broad spectrum of construction tasks. Michael Riker, a graduate from Stuttgart University, has been working at pool Architekten for three years now. Previously, he had used a traineeship to become convinced that this Zurich office was exactly the right place for him to start his professional career.

During his architectural studies at Munich technical university, Felix Constantin Graf completed an internship at Matteo Thun & Partners in Milan. This not only took the native of Bavaria to one of the most renowned offices of architecture, interior design and design in Italy but also to one of the design strongholds of Europe. In Matteo Thun’s office, he learned to appreciate working across the disciplines, above all with the example of an important healthcare project.

Already during adolescence, Jonathan Schuster came into contact with MVRDV. The Dutch pavilion for EXPO 2000 in Hanover had very much impressed the native of Luneburg. At that moment, he could not yet imagine that he would be working for exactly this architecture office sometime in the future and would completely identify himself with it. There are good reasons for this: Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries do not only convince with strong designs but also with an extremely user- and contextspecific kind of architecture.