The job description of the architect has fundamentally changed with the emergence of a globalized society, and it will continue to do so in the future. Already today, the demands of the job no longer correspond to the profile on which classical architectural training is based.

In this context, the question that arises is no longer that of the building alone, but also that of a changed approach to building and new pathways within design itself.

This is where Explorations comes in: internationally celebrated authors, all of whom are professors as well and hence directly involved in the processes they describe, address the principal topics of contemporary architectural research. Taking the works of their own design studios as examples (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule [ETH] Zürich [Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich]: Marc Angélil, Fabio Gramazio/Matthias Kohler; Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne [EPFL, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne]: Harry Gugger, Dieter Dietz), they offer concrete discussions of those topics and place them in the context of applied research and practice. Short and accessible essays on the most important architectural movements of the twentieth century clarify the relationship between the subjects discussed and canonical architectural research.

Reto Geiser is an architect who studied at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich) and Columbia University in New York. As the William Muschenheim Fellow and a lecturer in architecture and design, he spent the 2003–2004 academic year at the University of Michigan (USA). He is currently a doctoral candidate at the Institut gta (Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture) at the ETH Zürich.

In addition to his academic work, Reto Geiser also works on projects at the shared frontiers of architecture, installation, and visual culture. In Basel, he is director of the series Standpunkte: Informelle Gespräche zur zeitgenössischen ArchitekturKultur (Points of View: Informal Conversations on Contemporary Architecture/Culture). Geiser is currently curating the Swiss contribution to the XI Biennale of Architecture in Venice.

The exhibition at the Swiss Pavilion of the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale is merely intended as a springboard for further study of the subject.