The Rolex Learning Centre, Lausanne Architecture Art and pattern The Observer

‘Mesmerising’: the Rolex Learning Centre in Lausanne. Photograph: Suzuki Hisao

I am mesmerised. As far as I can see, in each direction, there are undulations, clad in grey carpet, glass, white metal, varied views of a prosy beyond. Everything is flow, but doors or steps, and pick people crop up as silhouettes on the majority inner horizons that the construction creates. It is similar to a small filmic prophesy of the afterlife, presumably 1960s vintage. Except that here the almighty is calibrated by frequent, identical, impeccably accurate Rolex clocks.

You can see the undulations as hills, maybe a anxiety to the circuitously Alps, and a deputy of the architects describes the combination as "musical". So the mountainous country are alive, I think irreverently and irrelevantly, with the receptive to advice of music.

At that point Kazuyo Sejima descends a slope. She is slight and poised, ready to go with witty magnificence in a ruched black skirt, and is not unequivocally majority similar to Julie Andrews.

Sejima is one half of Sanaa, a Japanese have have have use of of of that is the ultimate partisan to the pantheon of Rems, Zahas, Gehrys and Herzogs, that is to contend the rope of architects who by a small tellurian vicious accord are deliberate the majority appropriate in the world, and who are invited to contest opposite each pick for the pattern of museums, unison halls and pick informative buildings in 3 or 4 continents. The mesmerising construction is the £65m Rolex Learning Centre in the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). It is their greatest and majority fantastic work to date.

It can usually be a have a difference of time prior to the Pritzker prize, the architectural Nobel value $100,000 (£64,000) to the winner, is sent Sanaa"s way. Last year they written the Serpentine Gallery"s annual pavilion. This year Sejima has been invited to approach the Venice Architecture Biennale, whose boss has described her, in conditions that occupy a extraordinary clarity of gender, as "one of the new masters of the new millennium".

The engaging thing about the 54-year-old Sejima and her some-more contentious partner, Ryue Nishizawa, who is a decade younger, is that they are elusive. They have no declaration or residence character or signature: yes, they often have have have use of of of white metal, petrify and glass, but so do majority pick architects. They work ferociously hard: I have visited their Tokyo bureau at 9pm on a Saturday and seen their grey-faced staff gearing up for majority hours" work ahead. People have have have use of of of difference about them such as "strong" and "brave", and for Sejima to attain in the manly star of Japanese pattern she could be small else. But this work and bravery is in the have use of of something undefined.

They are majority gentle when articulate about their work. The Rolex Learning Centre is a new heart for a campus of 7,000 students and 4,000 investigate and educational staff, and includes a library, offices, bookshop, cafe, restaurant, laboratories, a 600-seat meeting house and a bend of Credit Suisse bank. Sanaa"s big thought is to have it in to "one outrageous big room", a 10,000 block metre domain where corridors are abolished and enclosures minimal.

"The main target is to have a space for people to stay together," says Sejima, "but where you can additionally have a small privacy." The pattern reflects their thought of "softening boundaries". She opposes "programmes that contend a room is a place to clarity and a mezzanine is a place to relax. I do not think that is a approach to learn. Sometimes, activities turn continuous. You competence have a coffee outward the classroom and shift your opinion."

The purpose of pattern is to indicate ways to have have have use of of of the space, rather than to prescribe. Nishizawa pushes the outcome with landscape: "When people find valleys, they lend towards to solve there and set up villages. When they find a hill, they similar to to set up a pleasing cafeteria on the hill. When they find slopes, they cover them in terraces." In the same way, they think their synthetic mountainous country will prompt opposite kinds of occupation: "We goal students can find good places for themselves."

What they have come up with in Lausanne is the work of an age of fibre and flow. It is a place but the dark of old libraries, a place where abounding believe can be accessed but attrition or fear. If you could live inside an iPad it would see something similar to this. It is a playground, a flower child paradise blending for destiny masters of a technological star – for the college it serves trains people to have ever some-more shining software, or watches, or healing procedures, in the future. This is because the centre"s sponsor, Rolex, is meddlesome in imprinting the brand. It equates to that it can take the majority appropriate students for itself.

The construction is additionally an pick being in an area of the star that specialises in such things. Underground, not far away, Cern"s Large Hadron Collider is requesting gigantic energy to the office of the esoteric. The International Olympic Committee, with the idealised perspective of star harmony, is formed in Lausanne. The Blue Brain Project, that is constructing a computer make-believe of the mammalian brain, is being run by the EPFL"s Brain and Mind Institute. Inside the guidance centre you feel as if informed things – hills, valleys, sky, inside, outside, natural, synthetic – have been rearranged in a bizarre and opposite way.

It verges on the scary and there are additionally times when some-more paltry being impinges in ungainly ways. Sanaa and internal authorities didn"t see eye to eye on the majority appropriate ways to grasp infirm access, with the outcome that a small ungainly ramps land on the flow, along with lifted strips to assistance blind people find glow exits. Prosaic contribution of construction, similar to curves that are a bit lumpy, get in the way.

But it is still an startling place. It is additionally a place which, for all the otherworldliness, reinstates your clarity of yourself. The slopes, similar to genuine hills, need you to practice your body. The point of the construction is the significance of earthy rather than practical proximity. When pressed, Sanaa in the future come up with the fugitive thing for that they quarrel so hard: "Our concentration is regularly to find opposite relationships." It sounds prosaic and nonetheless the realization in the guidance centre is anything but.