Valerio Olgiati (born 1958) is a Swiss architect and teacher, trained at ETH Zurich, who calls his approach "non-referential architecture", the title of a 2018 treatise he wrote with the theorist Markus Breitschmid. He has said that moving to Los Angeles mattered more to his formation than his studies, because it taught him to see the world in formal, natural terms rather than symbolic or historical ones. His Iconographic Autobiography (2006), a set of 55 images, sets out the ideas behind his work. He runs his office with his wife Tamara in Portugal and Switzerland, has taught at Harvard, ETH Zurich, Cornell and the Architectural Association, and has been a professor at the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio since 2002.
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His best-known projects include two early buildings in Switzerland, the Paspels School (1998) and Das Gelbe Haus in Flims (1999), a museum known in English as the Yellow House. The Atelier Bardill in Scharans (2007) followed. His work has been shown at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London and the Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City.
