Akinbode Akinbiyi - The Swiss Embassy in Berlin and Its Surroundings: A Building by Diener & Diener

The Swiss Embassy in Berlin and Its Surroundings: A Building by Diener & Diener focuses on the titular building in its historical, urban context, and the everyday life that surrounds it. Completed between 1995 and 2000, the Swiss Embassy is widely considered among the most significant works by Diener & Diener Architects, a Basel-based architectural practice recognized for their projects often conceived as statements that make our present time resonate with history by means of most minimal interventions in urban fabric. The book, unfolding as a single poster with multiple pictures on one side and texts on the other, portrays the Embassy—an exterritorial entity in a foreign state, hospitable in most cases exclusively to citizens of their own country—as an institution embodied in the building that contains it. Black-and-white images by Berlin-based photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi capture the building itself—located in the historically charged area in the knee of the river Spree, next to the Reichstag and the Federal Chancellery—as well as those walking by. The book includes new essays by Hannah Feldman, an historian and theorist of contemporary art, urban space, and decolonization, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, and a curator, former artistic director of documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, Adam Szymczyk. In photographs and texts, a fragmentary portrait of the building comes into being. Photographs by Akinbode Akinbiyi, with texts by Hannah Feldman and Adam Szymczyk and coda by Roger Diener. Design: Roger Willems.