Oral History
The European Council of Interior Architects proudly supports the Oral History project of the Swiss Interior Architecture Archive (AI-S). AI-S is a young association which aims to make the work, concepts and ideas of important Swiss interior architects of the 20th and 21st centuries available to the wider public. The archive is an initiative of the Association of Swiss Interior Architects VSI.ASAI. and various people from the research, teaching and communication fields contribute to this growing project. The particularity of this archive is their interviews with famous interior architects and interior designers, such as Verena Huber, Annette Stahl, Guido Berger, Eleonore Peduzzi-Riva, Doris Dietschy, and Hans Bissegger, to mention but a few. These in-depth interviews provide a unique opportunity to dive deeper into the thinking processes and get familiar with the life-long work of the key practitioners and thinkers from the interior architecture and interior design domain.
As part of the ongoing Creative Europe project “Building on Connections for a Stronger Profession”, ECIA encourages the growth of the Oral History initiative by contributing to the production of the interview and translation of several transcripts to the English language so that the contents of these interviews could become available within and also outside of our network.
The first interview was conducted with Verena Huber (1938). She was the first female President of the International Federation of Interior Architects (IFI) from 1976-1980 and received the Swiss Grand Prix Design 2022. Verena Huber grew up in Riehen near Basel in the Huber house. Her themes as an interior designer are living - textiles - Eastern Europe. She teaches, chairs associations and is a passionate networker. After retiring and giving up her own office she promotes projects in working groups in the context of living. The interview is now translated into English.
