Because of their award- winning competition project „Underground“, the architects Martijn van den Ban (NL), Valéry Didelon (F), Christelle Gualdi (F), Urs Primas (CH) and Ed Ravensbergen (NL) were invited to join the Dutch exhibition „Groepsportretten 2000“. Together, they started „Le Zoom“, a label for urban projects. Le Zoom organized two exhibitions about questions of urban development, „Imagine Den Bosch“ and „Hilverzoom 2030“. In the Dutch architecture boom of the late nineties, young architects were expected to create fast, fresh and funny projects. A critical attitude had become utterly unfashionable. “Does that mean that we have to quit worrying, quit thinking altogether?” Le Zoom asked itself. Would this not be the ideal moment for a critique of the seductive image, similar to the one attempted in advertisement by Oliviero Toscani’s work for Benetton?

Along with the two exhibitions, Le Zoom started to develop a kind of urbanistic science-fiction, a combination of texts, storyboards, visualizations and architectural projects. „Architects today are neither master builders nor the aggressive, avant-gardist visionaries of the Machine Age. We are communicators, just like graphic designers, art directors or science-fiction writers.“ But good science fiction cannot limit itself to selling bright images of the future: Only if we reveal the possibilities hidden in the present, indulging in their fascinations but also illuminating their dark sides, fiction can become useful and fertile as a tool for a critique of the present…

2002 was the end of Le Zoom - at least for the time being. Valéry Didelon and Christelle Gualdi left the Netherlands and returned to France. „Boba Fett“, a competition project designed by Urs Primas together with colleagues from Bosch Architects in Amsterdam proposed new concepts for housing in Switzerland and caused a bit of a stir in Zurich. Together with Proplaning AG and the general services contractor Batigroup AG, Urs won a competition for the renovation of a housing estate - „Three is a Crowd“- and returned to Zurich to create UP in the beginning of 2003.

UP is an architecture firm: we design housing buildings, schools, offices or interiors. Our starting point is often an opinionated interpretation of the program – as for example with the project „Svalutation“ where we designed, together with Jens Studer, special apartments for the ageing generation of 1968. Another field of activity are urban studies, plans and scenarios like for example „Agglo Agro“, a project dealing with the future of agricultural areas in Switzerland. For this kind of assignment in the fringe area of communication and urban planning we tie in with the methods developed by Le Zoom and try to put them to use for our client.