The distinction between authorship and actorship expediently polarises the paramount questions of the What? and of the How?, of the content and of the form. The point is not to apply a literary notion to some emulative acceptation of its content, but rather to hypothetically submit a conceptual intendment to its potential adequation in the field of architecture; and as such, Hobbes’ axiomatic statement informs us on the condition of the architect, whose authority is fundamentally a licensed and commissioned one; as the tributary of given programmatic, economic, and legal prerequisites and impelled through exogeneous necessities, architecture resolutely assigns its agent to performing a given act in the name and interest of (x): the architect is a political actor.

François Charbonnet studied architecture at ETH Zurich and collaborated with Terence Riley, Architects in New York (1997–98), Herzog & de Meuron (2000–03), and on a joint venture between Herzog & du Meuron and OMA (2000–01) before founding Made in with Patrick Heiz in 2003. He has also been a visiting professor at the EPF Lausanne, ETH Zurich, and the University of Lugano in Mendrisio, Switzerland. As of 2017 he is Visiting Professor at the Kyoto Design Lab, Japan.

Daniel Niggkli is founding member of the Zurich and Berlin based architectural practise EM2N. Their work has received several awards including bestarchitects, Umsicht-Regards-Sguardi, the Auszeichnung Guter Bauten from the City of Zurich, the Canton of Basel-Stadt and Basel-Landschaft, they received the Swiss Art Award in Architecture. Together with his office partner, Matthias Müller, they have been visiting professors at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, as well as in Zurich.