Atelier Grau is a 24-person architecture studio in Basel. We build museums, houses and towers that argue quietly with gravity — and win on points.
GRAU.
Selected works
2022 — 2026 · four case studiesHalle K
Kunstmuseum extension · Basel
A museum that borrows its light from the Rhine. Six galleries stack around a single ramped void; daylight is bounced twice before it ever touches a painting. The façade's 40-centimetre concrete fins shade the glass completely by noon in July — and never touch the ground.
Spiral House
Private residence · Zürichberg
One continuous room, 130 metres long, coiled around a cherry tree the clients refused to lose. The floor climbs 4.5 metres over a full turn; bedrooms are simply the quiet end of the spiral. There is exactly one door in the entire house. It leads to the sauna.
Verso Tower
Mixed-use high-rise · Rotterdam
A tower that gets thinner as the rent gets higher. Verso tapers 11 degrees against the prevailing wind, cutting structural steel by a fifth. Every third floor gives back a double-height loggia to the city grid — gardens you can see from the street, not just from the penthouse.
Klosterhof Archive
Adaptive reuse · Vienna
Four million documents inside a monastery that never planned for them. We slid a free-standing oak vault into the cloister — never touching the 400-year-old walls — and let the climate buffer live in the gap. The monks' corridor is now the longest reading desk in Austria.
Fieldnotes
Drag → · studies & details
Recognition
Selected · 2019 — 2026We draw slowly
and build precisely.
Twenty-four people, four languages, one workshop with a 5-axis mill in the basement. Every project begins as a 1:50 model you can hold, because a building you cannot explain to a neighbour is a building that should not exist. We take six commissions a year. Never seven.
Matteo GrauFounding partner
Ines HalterPartner · structures
Jonas BrennerPartner · heritage