Despite the country’s long-standing independence, no specifically Swiss architectural style had developed before 1800, and the various parts of the country by and large followed influences from the adjacent German, French and Italian states. This state of affairs at the same time prevented the emergence of a Pan-Swiss medieval or early modern repertoire which could have provided a nationwide thematic orientation for later historicist designs.
It was only the new constitutional set-up of the Helvetic Confederation in 1848 that created the conditions for a national architecture, principally for the new federal state buildings in Bern. (At the cantonal and municipal level, institutions continued to make use of older buildings, often rearranged monasteries, with city halls frequently dating back to the Middle Ages.) At the time, the preferred style was a sober neoclassicism, bereft of ornamentation, e.g. for the cantonal parliament building of Zurich (1841-43) or the Great Council building of Aarau (1826-28). A similar style was used for museums, schools and villas such as the Villa Ghisler in Magadino on Lago Maggiore (1843). The size was likewise modest; only in the second half of the century there was a small-scale imitation of the Vienna Ringstrasse in Winterthur’s array of neoclassicist public buildings.
The new federal state instituted its own architectural school, modelled on the French Ecole polytechnique, in 1855: the Eidgenössisches Polytechnikum of Zurich (renamed Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in 1912). Initially, however, Switzerland’s new architects had been trained at non-Swiss academies: Milan, Paris and Karlsruhe, Munich or Berlin. Conversely, a number of foreign architects were active within the country. All these factors played into the diversity and foreign orientation of Swiss building designs.
The appointment of the Dresden-based German architect Gottfried Semper at the Polytechnikum introduced architectural historicism (which he laid down in his handbook Der Stil, 1860-63, and passed on to his pupils), but with little application to native-Swiss models. Semper introduced, rather, a Neo-Renaissance style of Florentine-Italian inspiration. The federal government building of Bern (1894-1902; the design had been obtained by Hans Wilhelm Auer, after a competition dominated by Semper’s pupils), with its great cupola, had a vaguely Renaissance character, with Venetian and Florentine elements (befitting the building’s Republican character) fused into the Round-Arched style beloved in Munich. Conversely, the next federal complex to be built, in the Romance part of the Confederation, showed a French orientation: the Tribunal Fédéral in Lausanne (now known as the Palais de Justice). However, a French style also characterized Semper’s design for the new buildings of the Polytechnikum (1861-64) as well as its neighbouring university building (1911-14).
Meanwhile, the country itself was becoming more cosmopolitan as a result of the burgeoning railway system and tourist trade. This cosmopolitanism, and the demand for railway stations, hotels and sanatoriums, also reinforced the non-national proclivity of Swiss architecture. Semper’s projects for the Zurich Central Station (1860) and the Baden Kurhaus (1866) followed the model of ancient Roman thermae. Later designs moved towards a more neo-baroque, Parisian-inspired style; witness the Hotel National in Luzern (1869), the Grand Hotel Rigi in Kulm (1874-75) and the Caux-Palace above Montreux (1900-02). Inspired by aristocratic examples, the multiplicity of balconies betrays these buildings’ public rather than private occupancy.
Church buildings followed the mid-century taste for the Neo-Gothic, e.g. Basel’s Elisabeth Church (1859-65); but the Neo-Romanesque style which became popular in post-1871 imperial Germany found little echo in Switzerland, except for the early Glarus City Church (1864-66) and the Lombardy-inspired Trinity Church in Bern (1896-98). Medieval castles were reconstructed with a great deal of historicist fancy (Oberhofen, 1849-52), or imitated in the mansions of the newly affluent. Here the Loire Châteaux served as an example, e.g. Schloss Schadau (Thun, 1846-52), Rotes Schloss (Zurich, 1890-93). An Italianate style was maintained on the shores of Lake Lugano (Villa Ciani, 1839-40).
Neo-baroque inspired the museums, from Geneva’s Musée Ariana (1877-84) on. The Basel-based architect Emanuel La Roche set the tone, a friend of the great champion of baroque, the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin. La Roche invoked Bavarian rather than local examples, and in Zurich an Austrian influence was noticeable through the Viennese firm Fellner & Helmer, which contracted a number of theatre buildings across the German lands – the Zurich one in 1892. Neo-baroque churches (all Catholic) date from the years between 1900 and 1914 and likewise follow a southern German register. The neo-baroque municipal theatre of Geneva (1875-79), designed by the Paris-trained Elysée Goss, was influenced by the Opéra Garnier.
A native-historicist reference, attempting to capture a sense of the picturesque, was operative, uniquely, in designs for historical museums such as the many-turreted Schweizerisches Landesmuseum (Zurich 1892-98; its central armorial hall functioned almost as a national sanctuary), and its rival, the Historisches Museum of Bern (1892-96). In Basel, an awareness of medieval municipal culture expressed itself in the enlargement of the city hall (1898-1904) with the addition of a belfry. All the same, Neo-Gothicism (championed in Switzerland by Johann Georg Müller, 1822–1849; he had endorsed an abortive initiative in 1844 to create a Swiss national monument) functioned as part of a European trend: Lausanne Cathedral was completed by Viollet-le Duc (1872), and the spire of the Bern Munster was completed by August Beyer after he had achieved the same thing for Ulm.
There was, amidst all these international cross-currents, one specifically Swiss architectural tradition which the country could call uniquely its own: the wooden chalet characterized by its low-pitched gable roof with strongly protruding eaves and surrounding loggia in carved wood. This was canonized as a national heirloom after 1848, ironically with foreign stimulants like Schinkel’s Schweizerhaus (Potsdam 1837); an entire set of Swiss chalets was subsequently built in Klein Glienicke near Potsdam by Schinkel’s pupil Ferdinand von Arnim. The Swiss chalet style was reintroduced in its country of origin in the Kurhaus on Zurich’s Uetliberg (by the Berlin-trained Johann Jakob Breitinger, 1840). Ernst Georg Gladbach (1812–1896, appointed professor at the Polytechnikum in 1857) undertook studies of Swiss wooden architecture (Der schweizer Holzstil, 1868), which helped to position the chalet as a national icon; as such it was featured on the 1868 World’s Fair in Paris. Ironically, it also became an international export product as a result, used for hotels and railway stations, often with added turrets and bay windows; it remained especially widespread in Germany. Conversely, the chalet, considered a German design-type, never gained much popularity in Switzerland’s Ticino Canton, where the more Italianate landscape setting favoured a more campagna-type dwelling design.
