The practice, in full
Axona was set up in 2009 by two architects who had spent a decade watching their drawings get value-engineered by people who had never visited the site. The fix was structural rather than moral: keep feasibility, design, construction management and sales inside one office, on one contract, and make the same names answerable from the first survey to the final snag list.
Sixteen of the twenty-four people here have been on a Axona site in the last month, the two founders included. It is the cheapest quality-control system we know of.
Zürich · Aargau · 24 people · SIA member
The practice
Founded in 2009 as one studio that refused to hand its drawings to a stranger. Feasibility, permits, construction management and sales sit at the same table — nothing is lost in the handover, and nobody gets to blame the other side.
m² built and delivered
Projects completed
Cities across two cantons
Practice founded
How we work
Principle 01
Cost before concept
No sketch leaves the office before the number underneath it has been tested against a real tender. A design that cannot be built at the agreed price is not a design, it is a proposal for a second design.
Principle 02
One name per project
Every commission has a single partner who answers for it from the first survey to the final snag list. Holidays are covered; accountability is not delegated.
Principle 03
Site visits are not optional
The person who drew the detail walks it while it is being built. It is why our variation orders average under two per cent of contract value.
Who answers
One of these four signs your contract and takes your call on a Saturday.
Matthias Reber
Founding partner · Architecture
Ines Halter
Founding partner · Feasibility
Tobias Frei
Partner · Development management
Corinne Wyss
Partner · Sales strategy
Record
Two architects, one office
Matthias Reber and Ines Halter leave a large practice and open Axona above a print shop in Zürich West, with a single rule: no drawing leaves without its number.
Construction management brought in-house
After the fourth project lost detail on site, the practice hires its own site managers rather than tendering supervision out. Variation orders fall by two thirds within a year.
First cantonal commission
Sekundarschule Riet opens in Wettingen, the practice's first civic building and the start of the Aargau office.
Forty-seven projects, twenty-four people
112,000 m² delivered across six towns, still on one contract per client and still with one partner answerable per project.
A first feasibility read takes two weeks and costs nothing.