Formwerk designs houses, chapels, and civic buildings cast exclusively in raw board-formed concrete. No paint, no plaster, no cladding. The timber formwork leaves its grain in the wall, and the wall tells the truth about how it was made for the next two hundred years.
Most architecture hides its construction. Ours is its construction. Every wall we build was first a wall of wood; the concrete remembers each plank, each knot, each seam, each tie hole. When the formwork is struck, the building is finished. There is nothing left to apply, and nothing left to lie about.
We mill our own shuttering from rough-sawn Douglas fir and Baltic pine. Board width, saw pattern, and joint rhythm are designed drawings, not site accidents.
Day joints are composed like a musical score. We schedule pours around weather, light, and cure time so every lift line lands where it was drawn.
Honeycombing, blowholes, and color drift are kept, not patched. A repaired wall is an edited sentence; we prefer the first draft.
Our mixes use 45 percent slag replacement and local aggregate. A Formwerk building should weather into a better version of itself, not a worse one.
We design the shuttering before the building. Board widths, saw textures, joint offsets, and tie-hole grids are drawn at 1:1 and mocked up in our Basel yard before any drawing of a room exists.
Weeks 1 - 10Rough-sawn Douglas fir is milled, soaked, and assembled into shutters by our in-house carpentry team. Each board is numbered; many are reused across three or four projects until they retire.
Weeks 8 - 20Pours are scheduled around temperature and humidity windows. Our slag-heavy mix is placed in slow lifts and vibrated by hand so the wood grain prints cleanly into the face of the wall.
Site months 1 - 9Formwork comes off after a documented cure. What appears is the finished building: no paint, no sealer beyond a breathable mineral wash, no second chances, and no need for one.
The other 200 yearsFormwerk is eleven people in a former tram depot in Basel: six architects, three carpenters, one concrete technologist, and one archivist who photographs every strike day.
We take on three to four projects a year and decline everything that asks for a second material. That constraint is not a brand; it is how we got good. Fifteen years inside one material taught us things about mix design, formwork pressure, and weathering that a generalist practice cannot learn.
Clients come to us for houses, chapels, baths, archives, and infrastructure that must outlive its budget cycle. They stay because a Formwerk building costs almost nothing to maintain: there is no finish to fail.
Depot Dreispitz · Florenz-Strasse 1 · 4142 Basel
Trained under Peter Zumthor's formwork crew before architecture school. Draws every shutter elevation herself.
Structural engineer turned architect. Author of "The Lift Line", a field manual on day-joint composition.
Runs the formwork yard. Keeps a library of 3,000 numbered boards, some on their fifth building.
Designs every mix. Currently testing a 60 percent slag replacement cured under recycled rainwater.
We accept three to four commissions per year, beginning with a one-day formwork workshop at our Basel yard so you can put your hands on the material before you sign anything. Budgets typically start at CHF 1.2M for residential work.