The brief by the World Health Organisation (WHO) is a design for the Geneva Headquarters Office Extension in Switzerland. What is the best way we can help an organisation devoted to helping others? Our first step was to study WHO's heritage-listed Headquarters building by Jean Tschumi; like geneticists we sought to understand the building's DNA. DNA is the fundamental building block of all life. Behind its code lies an implied logic which dictates not only an organism’s structural function, but also how its many parts operate harmoniously as one, ensuring its survival and consequent evolution. 

 

The proposal integrates our contemporary understanding of modernism, framing it within the heritage context of the existing building precinct. ‘Doing more with less’ - We seek to provide what appears to be a simple solution to a complex problem. The design, location and configuration of the WHO extension reinforces the balance within the existing architectural ensemble, complementing and enhancing both the existing buildings and their surrounding landscape. Our concept, coevolution, is the changing of an object instigated by the modification of a related object. Each exerts selective pressures on the other, thereby symbiotically affecting each other's evolution. We understand the WHO extension as a result of the coevolutionary process between the existing WHO headquarters and our interpretation of 21st century Modernism.