The architect perhaps now feels like the youth in the legend, given a lyre by the good sorceress. As soon as he began to play it, the most wonderful palaces arose around him, guided by his fantasy. He throws the lyre to one side, eager to set foot in his palaces, to walk around them, only for them to silently collapse and disappear. He had forgotten the warning that went with the muses’ gift: he could never enter his creations.
–Lisbeth Sachs1
The most contrasting buildings of Lisbeth Sachs (1914–2002) in terms of their durability were the Kurtheater in Baden, Aargau, which was planned in 1939 and inaugurated in 1952, and the three pavilions of the art gallery for the second Schweizerische Ausstellung für Frauenarbeit (Swiss Exhibition of Women’s Work), or SAFFA, in Zurich in 1958. The Kurtheater, with whose design the architect, barely having graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, won the competition in 1939 at the age of 25, was renovated after almost seventy years of operation by E. & M. Boesch Architekten between 2018 and 2020 in accordance with monument preservation principles. Her art gallery for the 1958 SAFFA, conversely, was the only building in the temporary event that was earmarked for retention, but the plan failed due to a lack of financial backing, and the building was dismantled after only a few months.2
Despite their different forms of “conservation”—the Kurtheater has survived, while the art gallery pavilions have physically disappeared into obscurity, remaining only in collective memory—the two projects are exemplary of the architect's understanding of architecture. For Sachs, process was inherent in both building and the finished object. This understanding manifested itself in both projects’ use of the promenade architecturale, the experience of space by walking through it; in the organic cycle of being and passing away, or how every building, as soon as it is completed, strives towards decay; and in the conviction that the imagination and perception interact with one another, and must be taken into account when designing spaces.
Architectural Promenade
In the Kurtheater, the pivotal point of the architectural promenade is the glass foyer. This building, designed as a pavilion on a polygonal floor plan, contrasts the cubes of the vertically accentuated stage tower and the horizontally positioned auditorium. The foyer is formed as “an independent architectural volume separated from the greater architectural mass and placed in the oval clearing on the park lawn, surrounded by the beautiful old groups of trees.”3 The promenade architecturale here was intended to slowly guide the visitors ever deeper into the intimate atmosphere of the auditorium: from the street, via the portico, into the entrance hall, and from there up a set of stairs into the glazed foyer, which in turn formed the hinge to the auditorium a few steps higher up. Sachs’s description makes it sound as if her intention was to create a cathartic progression:
The way into the theatre proceeds via an open-sided, covered row of columns, leading to a spacious but slightly low-ceilinged and not-too-brightly-lit cloakroom hall, and from there, round a right angle and via a wide set of steps, into the glass polygon of the foyer. The foyer has no curtains and thus opens up entirely to the park, at the same time still guiding the visitor to the stairs up to the auditorium by virtue of its circular form, accentuated by the visible steel radiuses in the ceiling. The auditorium, in turn, faces inward, focusing on the play of the stage, prompting the visitors, in their escape from everyday life, to settle themselves down to encounter a critical reflection of their own lives.4
Similarly, the pavilions of the 1958 SAFFA were conceived, according to Sachs:
as an answer to the question: how would you most like to encounter pictures, works of art, freed from the museal straitjacket of the right angle? Wandering, ambling, along curved, open paths. That is what lead to the rhythmically arranged concrete walls in different lengths and directions, generating a space towards the middle that invites the visitors to experience the act of viewing, creating open berths of different sizes towards the outside. The tent-like plastic roofs provide light from above. As a whole, the building wanted to maintain a feeling of flow, improvisation, openness.5
Shielded by translucent roof surfaces, one should encounter pictures “during a stroll through a loose forest of easels.”6
Growth and Decay
Sachs followed what she understood to be a universal approach. She called for a:
new referential framework rooted in nature; a referential framework in a greater, all-encompassing sense, that also includes human existence and decay, and therefore an omni-affinity between plants, animals, humans and stone, also between the creations of both humankind and nature. This is not romanticism, rather it is a new design morphology and definition from inwards—also spiritually.7
The stringency with which Sachs set out to follow this approach—guided by growth and decay, being and perishing—is evident in her description of the architectural process of the Baden Kurtheater:
Every construction project has something exciting about it for the architect and the public, because the plan ascends into the third dimension and is intended as a confirmation of what was thought ahead and felt on paper. With this, the first encounter with other people’s opinions takes place, with the already lively participation, now embodied for the public in space, form, and color. Life and work on the building site bustles—the coming and going of workmen, the foreman, the transport of material. A life that is suddenly eclipsed on the opening day of the building, ready both inside and out to commence operating. Everyone is in a festive and happy mood to soak up, for the first time, the stage performance, the music, within the new walls. But for us builders it was a departure. For us the building lived as it strove to overcome the many obstacles to reach fruition.8
Here Sachs describes the moment when the young architect would have been better off “not entering their creation.” When an architectural work is being built, it strives towards consummation yet essentially never reaches it—or if it does, then only for a brief moment before it begins decaying. In this sense, the finished building is a coming ruin. Architecture, by definition, is a state of suspension. This also applies to ruins, where the balance between still-building and already-rubble is precarious and tends always towards decline. The ruin is never finished, or only when it entirely reverts back to nature.
Unless, that is, the ruin is preserved, or worse still, the building that has disappeared is reconstructed. Then the face of transience is disfigured and the viewer is robbed of their fantasy, as described so impressively by Stendhal when viewing the Capitoline Hill in Rome: “It is by the aid of the small number of columns still subsisting in a ruin that one imagines what the ancient monument was. Every small detail of what remains constitutes a révélation.”9
Sachs likewise considered the “mummification” of architecture to be an abomination. Instead, ruins should be a source from which new life can grow.10 Or, as she put it elsewhere, ruin-like architecture contained a “stimulus to ‘new life.’”11
Non-finito
Transience was also the raison d'être of the SAFFA art gallery. Sachs described the idea behind the project as follows:
Perhaps somewhere in my subconscious mind was the memory of the most beautiful exhibition I had ever seen, which set me free. Milan 1956, Picasso in a bombed-out palazzo, with gauze-like rolls of fabric hanging from the walls. On them, unframed panels from the Epoque bleu and from Cubism. Light from above. An irrational, huge space with an amorphous impact. The entire focus was on the visitor and their searching eye on the pictures.12
“Milan 1956” here refers to the spectacular Picasso exhibition actually staged in 1953 within the heavily damaged and provisionally repaired walls of the Palazzo Reale in Milan.13 The main work on show was Guernica, painted by Picasso for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 World Exhibition in Paris. The Milan exhibition stirred up emotions. The culture editor of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Paul Vogt, was noticeably moved:
Anyone who walks across the Milan Cathedral Square in the mellow October glow of the Lombard sky should take heart. He will come across an exhibition that demands, consumes, and devours his attention. He will follow breathlessly a series of pictures and a chain of sculptures, as if he was walking in a thunderstorm, affected by the most concentrated and abrupt eruption that has ever been forced into form and brought into imagery in the century so far.14
In the large, soot-black Caryatid Hall, whose ceiling had collapsed, two monumental murals La Guerre and La Paix, which were originally made for Vallauris in 1952, stood diagonally in the room on a makeshift, diagonally-braced steel structure next to Guernica. “The visitor, led through a narrow passageway, is immediately confronted by a fully unexpected perspective, where amidst magical dereliction Picasso’s pictures take on a completely unusual dimension.”15
Sachs’s affinity for ruins, as for all things organic, can perhaps be traced back to her training under Alvar Aalto April to September, 1938. For him, a derelict Karelian village had a visual echo of Greek ruins. The remains of the architectural structures revealed that Karelian dwellings began based on a single, modest cell, which “then grows, in a figurative sense, from year to year. The ‘growing Karilian house’ can be compared in certain respects to biological cell formation.”16
Sachs was likewise drawn by the allure of decay. She would have undoubtedly subscribed to the analysis formulated by the architect and photographer Reto Gadola of holiday houses as an architectural type:
The “physics” of the architectural object exist only seemingly in a state of balance. Whether it be micro-organisms, which with enough dampness can destroy a wooden bench, or an unleashed storm that blows the roofing away, or the cooker which after twenty years of service stops working, or whether the act of building is understood as a process and the holiday home is never completed, or whether the children architecturally alter the holiday house after the death of their parents—in its substance, architecture is continually threatened, or to formulate it positively, is exposed to a permanent process of change.17
In extremis, the house disappears, in the words of Frei Otto, “by itself in an environmentally friendly way.”18 Or, alternatively, it is already, by design, fashioned to be transient.
Insofar as the number of unrealized projects of Sachs greatly exceeded her built ones, her oeuvre is non-finito. Following Stendhal, her designs excite our sense of fantasy. They are inverse ruins. Perhaps, following Jürgen Joedicke, the fact they were never completed is more inspiring than if they had been completed.19
The “most wonderful palaces according to his own imagination” that Sachs conjured up at the Kurtheater and the “ghosts” that haunted her when designing the SAFFA art pavilions symbolize the fantasies that fed her creativity. Spaces emerged from the “ghost,” the vision, the dream image, the phantasm. This is what she meant when she called for houses that help “stimulate our own creative imagination.”20 In 1984, she stated: “All space has something to do with the inner being of man and with his thinking. With his feeling of optical-physical perception—and the thoughts that extend beyond it.”21
Lisbeth Sachs, “Liebes erstes Publikum,” manuscript, lecture, n.d. {1952}2 pp. 2, gta Archive, 114-01.
Mariette Beyeler, “La SAFFA (Schweizerische Ausstellung für Frauenarbeit) de 1958 à Zurich. Son architecture et ses architectes,” Diss., EPF Lausanne 1999, S, 145.
Lisbeth Sachs, “Wettbewerbsprojekt für ein neues Kurtheaters in Baden, Erläuterungsbericht,” 30 August 1939, {2 pp.} 1, gta Archive, 114-01-S3 (1/5).
Lisbeth Sachs, “Gedanken über Architektur anlässlich von Entwurf und Bau des neuen Kurtheaters,” Badener Neujahrsblätter 28 (1953): 36.
Lisbeth Sachs, “Zur Ausstellungsgestaltung der SAFFA” {part of “SAFFA 1958 in Zürich: 2. Ausstellung ‘Die Schweizerfrau, ihr Leben, ihre Arbeit’”}. Werk 45, no. 10 (1958): 356.
Lisbeth Sachs, “Teilbiographie,” manuscript, n.d., {11 pp., 10 paginated} 8, gta Archive, 114-01.
Lisbeth Sachs, “Studentenheim des Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (USA),” Werk 37, no. 4 (1950): 102.
Lisbeth Sachs, “Gedanken über Architektur,” 36.
A Roman Journal by Stendhal, ed. and trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: The Orion Press, 1957), 91.
Lisbeth Sachs, “Nostalgie in der Architektur: Sicht einer heutigen Gestalterin,” SWBInformation 2 (1977): 8.
Lisbeth Sachs, “Neue Wege für die Lösung von Jugendhausproblemen in grossen Städten,” WerkbundMaterial 1 (n.d.): 12.
Lisbeth Sachs, “Teilbiographie,” 8.
The royal palace was badly damaged by fire as a result of British bombing on August 15, 1943. The renovation of the Palazzo Reale was initially slow and only in parts. It was only completely restored at the turn of the century. See Carbonara and Palazzo 2012, 75. For photos of the sala before and after the bombing, see ➝.
Paul Vogt, “Pablo Picasso in Mailand,” NZZ, 7 October 1953, section 1, morning ed., no. 2319, n.p. {2 pp., here 1}.
Antonio Frova, “Kunstausstellungen in Mailand,” Werk 44, no. 10 (1957): 354–58. For the arrangement, see the color photograph by Hans Hinz in “‘Stark und zwiespältig’: Eine Umfrage bei Schweizer Besuchern der Picasso- Ausstellung in Mailand,” Du 14, no. 7 (1954): 39–40.
Cited in Göran Schildt ed., Sketches: Alvar Aalto (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), 82.
Reto Gadola, “Zur Physik des Ferienhauses,” in Architektur der Sehnsucht: 20 Schweizer Ferienhäuser aus dem 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Reto Gadola (Zurich: gta Verlag, 2013), 75.
Frei Otto, “‘Wie weiter?’: Festvortrag zum 122. Schinkelfest des Architekten- und Ingenieursvereins zu Berlin,” SBZ 95, no. 16 (1977): 231.
Jürgen Joedicke, “Zugbeanspruchte Konstruktionen,” {Frei Otto und Rudolf Trostel} BW 17, no. 4 (1963): 176.
Lisbeth Sachs, “Vortrag Volkshochschule über meine Arbeit, Febr. 54,” Ms., 19 S., hier S. 11, gta Archives, LS, 114-T-2.
Lisbeth Sachs, “Notizen zum neuen Raum der leichten Flächen,” in Institut für leichte Flächentragwerke (Hg.), Subjektive Standorte in Baukunst und Naturwissenschaft. Eine Veröffentlichung zum zwanzigjährigen Bestehen des IL..., Stuttgart 1984 (Mitteilungen des Instituts für leichte Flächentragwerke 36, S., 80.
