The expansion of an architectural practice from Switzerland to Vietnam, and specifically from Geneva to Hanoi, is an unlikely career move. Not relocation so much as dislocation. Chaotic, vivacious, and freewheeling Hanoi could be regarded as the anti-Geneva, as the anti thesis of the discreet, the manicured, and the buttoned-down. Yet over the last decade, G8A has oscillated between the prim and proper and the wild and won derful, retaining a thoroughly Swiss sense of propriety whilst engaging with the bewildering complexities and contradictions of contemporary Asia. Several of G8A’s key projects have been located in Singapore, which is something of a cultural halfway house and often referred to as a tropical Switzerland. Singapore’s heat is merciless, and the conditions demand an architecture with a dia metrically dissimilar structural approach than that required for a cold climate.

The first book to document G8A’s achievements to date, Contrast and Cohesion reflects the Swiss firm’s work in these starkly contrasting parts of the world; Singapore the “Tropical Switzerland” and Hanoi the “Anti-Geneva”. Featuring twenty-seven projects through drawings, photographs, plans, and descriptive texts, the book also brings together essays that expand on the different concerns and challenges that accompany the creation of architecture in Central Europe and Southeast Asia.