The couple’s early work, at the tail end of the 1960s, was Pop-inflected yet driven by a budding desire to slay such idols as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius by adding daring ornament to cherished Modernist iconography. One chair, with a leopard-covered seat, is made of neon tubes instead of the then-ubiquitous steel; another seems to be melting like chocolate into pools on the floor. In a twist on the classic Thonet bentwood No. 14 chair, the Haussmanns knitted together three chairs painted in primary hues, their backs meshed in a graceful jumble like Martha Graham dancers.

In the 1970s, they dubbed their evolving aesthetic Critical Mannerism, which was inspired by the late High Renaissance style of European art that emerged around 1490. Like the Mannerists, the Haussmanns celebrated artificiality and illusion, though instead of battling the clarity and simplicity of Michelangelo, they were jabbing at the pared-down heart of Modernism. They toyed with perspective, using mirrors and intricate intarsia (had Escher made furniture, it might have looked like this). They dabbled in conceptual art that included text: The “Log-O-rithmic Slide Rule” consisted of a list of adjectives and adverbs that could be slid up and down against each other to form Dadaesque phrases. And while they were designing buildings and retail interiors that disrupted staid Swiss expectations, they also made dozens of hauntingly beautiful objects that deconstructed classical forms, including perhaps their most seminal piece, an elaborate Roman column with radially hinged drawers.

Like the Memphis crew, loosely led by Ettore Sottsass, the Haussmanns believed that function should follow form, but the form they mastered could actually function in real life instead of just the fever dreams of collectors. (Karl Lagerfeld vacuumed up many of the early Memphis pieces as soon as they were made; the rest are mostly confined to museums.) Due to their elaborate construction, few Haussmann pieces made it to wide-scale production, though their restrained, cerebral geometry renders them timeless. Recently Walter Knoll rereleased the pair’s Chesterfield armchair, an arch take on the cozily traditional shape, outfitted with wittily incongruous tubular steel legs. It bears the same revolutionary punch today.

For decades the Haussmanns lived on the top floors of a slender building that includes their studio, which they continue to visit daily. But home is now across town, a 1,700-square-foot apartment with an elevator that overlooks one of Zurich’s historic streets. The rooms are filled with their work, including a massive neo-Classical desk that Robert trompe l’oeiled by hand, as though it were deep blue marble — a blue that doesn’t exist in nature, Trix notes proudly. “To us, the best thing is to not be a slave to what is natural,” she says, “to go beyond, to shock, to twist, not to accept.”