a+u’s December 2023 issue features the Swiss architecture firm Edelaar Mosayebi Inderbitzin Architekt*innen (EMI), founded in 2005 by architects Ron Edelaar, Elli Mosayebi, and Christian Inderbitzin. Working primarily in Switzerland, their works include exhibitions, refurbishments, building projects, and urban planning. However, housing is the firm’s dominant architectural preoccupation, as they examine and reinterpret the small-scale components that contribute to human agency and delight within a dwelling. As EMI says, they have “developed a veritable obsession with doors.” EMI are storytellers, using subtle gestures – a turn of a wall, the absence of a lintel – to expand upon the purely functional perception of everyday architectural elements. Moving away from the neutral container, EMI embeds rational design choices with notions of poetry, as evident in the 21 projects presented here. Oscillating between the two metaphors of ruins and machines, the projects described on the coming pages move through concepts of gardens and landscapes, villas and high-rises.