Oliver Lütjens: This exhibition at the Architekturforum, entitled The end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end. Is progress even possible in architecture?, celebrates 28 years of your practice. It is special for me, because when we started teaching together in 2007, you had just finished the Museum of Childhood, you were doing the competition for Escher Wyss Platz, later the competition for the building on Europaallee, and that was the moment where you put a foot, slowly but surely, into Switzerland.

Maria Conen and I were quite surprised by the title of this exhibition, because we know that both of you, and your work, are generally optimistic. So, we were wondering what was up with that title? I also wonder if progress is even relevant for architecture, because progress is something that comes from science, it builds up one thing after another, but for science, there is no turning back. For architecture, there is. So, we thought we would begin by speaking about evolution.

For our generation, which is a least one generation after yours, English architecture was the missing link between the heroes of Swiss-German architecture and the contemporary condition. We started studying in the mid-nineties Herzog & de Meuron, Diener Diener, Meili Peter, Burkhalter Sumi were all very present at that time, not necessarily as teachers, but as practitioners with interesting, radical, and diverse work. Later, when we finish our studies and started our own practices, the next generation very quickly became successful by simply carrying on with the same set of ideas that didn't seem so radical and experimental anymore. That is when we discovered your work, a new group of British practices that also included Tony Fretton and Sergison Bates, who were also interested in the Swiss scene, in the same heroes as we were.

Your early work was an answer to Swiss architecture. It was looking at that work with fresh eyes, finding new meanings and possibilities. So, when and how did Switzerland become important to you?

Adam Caruso: I think Peter saw it before me, I remember seeing pictures he took of Herzog & de Meuron's Ricola buildings, and of the building along a party wall in Hebel strasse. But I can remember when I first became aware of the work, it was before we started working together, looking through issues of Quaderns magazine in the mid-eighties, when Josep Luis Mateo was the editor. I remember an issue arriving at the office when I was working for Florian Beigel, that had his Half Moon Theatre, a very blue detailed photograph of it, on the cover. It was a double issue about new European practice. Also, in that issue was the small plywood house in the backyard that's around the tree by Herzog & de Meuron as well as other interesting projects of that time. We weren't so busy at the office, and we probably spent an hour, Florian and I, turning through every page, talking about what was there.

And then, three or four months after that, Florian was preparing a lecture, that I spent a lot of time helping with, and one of the things I had to do was phone Herzog & de Meuron's office to get photographs of the plywood house. They sent three 35mm slides, I think the photos were taken by Pierre de Meuron. Later, Florian invited Jacques Herzog to give a lecture in London, and I think it was the first lecture that he gave outside of Switzerland, and he slept on Florian's sofa. That lecture remained special for Herzog, and he was always generous towards Florian.

Before we started our practice, that first small book on Herzog & de Meuron came out, the square GG, and Peter and I would pore over each page, analyzing each photograph and drawing at length.

Peter St John: When we started our practice, Adam and I spent a lot of time talking and looking at books, and we were teaching at London Met (then called Polytechnic of North London). I remember seeing those early projects, and they made me think. When you start a practice, you are trying to decide on a direction, you are not sure what you want to do, what is interesting. Those early projects by Herzog & de Meuron felt incredibly refreshing within the British context in the early-nineties, the interest in nature, the unusual ways of drawing that felt completely different from the very clean way of making drawings that we were familiar with in the offices we were working in, a very precise attitude about building and construction...Those themes were radically at odds with what we were used to in the British context.

From the British perspective, we have always been the people who brought Switzerland to London. We are still seen as that. It is a very different view that people have of us there than you have of us in Zurich. We were one of the first people in London to look at Swiss architecture in the early-nineties. We went to Basel, we looked at the buildings with our students and we got to know Harry Gugger. He had this brilliant idea when Herzog & de Meuron won the Tate Modern project in 1995, that he would employ Adam and myself as the project architects. We were two people, we had no office at all. But then he discovered that he couldn't even get hold of us on the telephone because Adam and I were on the building site. So, he gave up on that idea very quickly. It was a very early love affair.

Maria Conen: I think that is exactly the point, you brought Swiss architecture to England and the distance affected a transformation so that we could feel a new kind of energy in the work. And now the distance is shrinking, you are in Switzerland, you have quite a big practice with big projects here in Zurich, you are teaching a lot of students at the ETH. Has this changed your architecture? What is your relationship to the contemporary Swiss architecture scene?

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