Manuel Herz is an architect and researcher whose work explores the intersections of migration, displacement, and urbanism. His scholarship has produced influential books, including From Camp to City: Refugee Camps of the Western Sahara, which examines how refugee camps evolve into lasting urban environments, and African Modernism — Architecture of Independence, a landmark survey of post-independence architecture across sub-Saharan Africa. Though these works address very different contexts, both investigate what Herz describes as the “power of a new beginning” and architecture’s ability to shape collective futures.

Based in Basel, Switzerland, Manuel Herz Architects combines rigorous research with a diverse built portfolio that spans typologies, scales, and geographies—from the architectural to the territorial. The practice’s completed projects include the striking Synagogue of Mainz, an apartment building with kinetic facades in Zurich, and a social housing complex with an integrated kindergarten in Lyon. Herz’s work demonstrates how architecture can operate simultaneously as cultural inquiry, social infrastructure, and spatial innovation.