The older people get, the more frequent the occasions to experience one’s body being subjected to the logic of clinical expediency. It's like taking the plane. The more sophisticated the machinery used, the greater one’s tolerance for the assembly line of dehumanizing controls, and the more curtailed the time available for their application. In order to avoid wasting time, hospital personnel are organized in discretely defined functions: from the doctor and nurses to the receptionists in the lobby. Hospital architecture is the art of orchestrating the time people spend before-and-after critical examinations of (or interventions into) their bodies. The hospital can therefore be thought of primarily as a very big machine for channeling people through a series of diagnostic or therapeutic protocols, and its rooms chiefly as places of delay. The experience of the hospital, therefore, is of a series of accelerations and decelerations, often jarringly interchanged. For the very young, hospital visits are hopefully rather more rare, but are all the more charged.1
“Noah's Ark.” Copperplate. Source: Johann Jakob Scheuchzer. Kupfer-Bibel, in welcher die Physica Sacra...deutlich erklärt...(etc.) (Zürich, 1751).
1) Noah’s Ark
In a 2016 essay entitled “Noah’s Ark,” the French art historian and philosopher Hubert Damisch reminds us that in the Encyclopédie, the article on “Ark” (Arche) (by Abbé Edme-François Mallet) is three times longer than the one on “Architecture” (by Jacques François Blondel).2 Damisch offers several explanations for this. First of all, he sees the eighteenth century fascination with the “Ark” as yet another foreboding of a world subjected to the rule of mathematics, logic, and statics (remember that, according to the Scriptures, the Biblical ark was to be approximately 570 meters long, a measure never even reached by any twentieth century transatlantic liner).3 As to the flood, without which there would be no ark, Damisch contends that for eighteenth century chroniclers, there loomed the specter of another impending catastrophe: revolution. No wonder then that Damisch repeatedly refers to Le Corbusier and his book Vers une architecture (Towards an Architecture, 1923), whose concluding chapter is famously entitled “Architecture or Revolution,” in which he claims “Revolution can be avoided.” While in Vers une architecture “Noah’s Ark” is merely implied in the book’s many illustrations of contemporary ocean liners, forty years later, the Dutch architect Piet Blom explicitly chose it as the title for an urbanist concept capable of re-conceptualizing his own country, the Netherlands.
“Why would today's city apartment deprive us from the ocean liner's comfort?” Source: Le Corbusier, La ville radieuse (1933).
The “Ark,” as imagined by Abbé Mallet (or by the engraver Johann August Corvinus in a tome entitled Physica Sacra that predates the Encyclopédie by a few decades) is more than a simple exercise of architectural technology.4 Beyond symbolizing the Enlightenment idea of architecture as bulwark, it presents the mission of Modern Architecture as a rescue operation based on the methods of the natural sciences and the technologies that derive from them. The most emblematic eighteenth century example of this is Bernard Poyet’s unbuilt proposal for a radical re-building of the oldest continuously running hospital in the world, the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris, as a colossal “machine à guérir” (“healing machine”). Poyet proposed replacing the Hôtel-Dieu in the center of Paris with a colosseum-like panopticon on an island in the Seine. While the combination of a baroque conception of authority with modern techniques of control speaks for itself, what makes this emblematic is its underlying logic of salubrity and hygiene. For Bruno Fortier, the story of the Hôtel-Dieu marks a moment in the history of architecture when projects begin to be no longer conceived by ways of a simple relationship to history, “but in terms of a double imperative of technical rationalization and disciplinary efficiency, both with regards to economy and the exercise of power.”5 If so, then Poyet’s “healing machine” is a direct antecedent of Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine, a project done some 150 years later that applies a similar program of radical hygiene to an entire city, transforming it into nothing so much as a colossal air conditioner.6
Bernard Poyet, project for a new 'Hôtel Dieu' (central hospital complex) outside Paris, c. 1780, as printed on the cover of Michel Foucault, Blandine Kriegel, Bruno Fortier, et al., Les Machines à guérir (aux origines de l'hôpital moderne) (Paris: Institut de l'environnement, 1976).
More pragmatic, but still preoccupied with the idea of social progress through the implementation of “hygiene,” is a 1929 booklet by Sigfried Giedion, Befreites Wohnen (Liberated Living). Giedion, an art historian, polemicist, admirer of the Bauhaus and friend of Le Corbusier, writes: “The most recent studies undertaken in medical science on hospital building all agree on a subject that now concerns the entire realm of architecture: the DOCTOR, too, calls for a total dissolution of the wall into glazed surfaces, for a totally unimpeded access of light.” The persuasive power of Giedion’s didacticism relied on the fact that at the time of his writing, exposing the body to the sun and to fresh air was the only treatment for the most threatening mass disease: tuberculosis.7 There was no effective medication, and neither penicillin nor streptomycin had been invented yet. Medicine had no choice but to recruit architecture.
Paris. Dormitory annex to a Salvation Army hospice for homeless people. Source: Le Corbusier & Pierre Jeanneret, architects, 1926.
2) The “Factory of the Good”
Around 1925, an American-born philanthropist in Paris and heir to the Singer sewing machine empire, Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac, decided to turn away from sponsoring projects of contemporary music and art, and to move towards helping the urban poor. An erstwhile friend of Gertrude Stein and one of the early subscribers to L’Esprit Nouveau, Singer had been familiar for many years with Le Corbusier’s visionary ideas for the reform of domesticity and the re-organization of life in the city.
After a personal encounter with the architect, possibly at some private musical event in a salon,8 she wrote to Albin Peyron, the commissioner of the French section of the Salvation Army and offered to sponsor a four-story addition to the Palais du Peuple, a homeless shelter in Paris, under the condition that he agreed to drop the architect he had already hired and work with Le Corbusier instead. The result of what even the princess’s biographer calls an “extraordinary piece of blackmail” turned out to be the first of a long series of projects done by Le Corbusier for the Salvation Army. “Our stripped-down dormitory will be modest compared to San Marco or the marble paneling of Il Redentore,” the architect wrote to her in a letter, alluding to Venice, which was the princess’s second home. “But we can bring to the Palais du Peuple’s humble frame the unsuspected riches born of its proportions.”9
The annex, though invisible from the street, swiftly made it to the pages of the Parisian press and then to the intellectual marketplace of the avant-garde. Giedion referred to it in his small booklet as a demonstration of modern architecture’s emancipatory social vocation. Two years later, the princess decided to financially support another, much larger Salvation Army project, the “Cité de Refuge.”10 And once again, the architect had to be Le Corbusier. Building began in September 1928, when the architect’s memories of his recent visit to the USSR were still fresh. Among the buildings there that he found most intriguing was a huge student hostel by Ivan S. Nikolaev just completed outside of Moscow: a machine-like habitat meant as a transit camp for young people in the process of moving on from one stage in life to another.11 A Salvation Army hospice is no student hostel, but the organizational analogies are striking. Both are “social condensers” (a term frequently used for modernist communal houses in the Soviet Union). Both institutions share, alongside an element of coercion, an engineering metaphor embedded in their form and implied by the very term “condenser”: the modern steam engine. Once completed, Cité du Refuge turned out to be one of Le Corbusier’s largest projects realized in the interwar years, and certainly the most significant in terms of the architect’s ideas about social reform. - It was also the most alarming in terms of his tendency to consider the inhabitants of his buildings as guinea pigs at the service of technical progress.12
At first sight, the continuous glazing of the seventy-meter-long, seven-story high south façade is a perfect illustration of the modern movement’s infatuation with openness and transparency. Yet its impermeability and the inefficiency of the then available air conditioning system led building temperatures to be freezing in winter and frequently well above 30° Celsius in summer, denying its inmates the healthy living that had been promised.13 But the plan of this “machine à guérir”—a transit station for the homeless and the unemployed in preparation for their reinsertion into society—follows an even more draconian logic. If Poyet had followed the model of the panopticon and the air filter, Le Corbusier replaced it by that of physical anatomy: structure, circulation, and skin are defined as an interactive system analogous to the human body. The building’s underlying principle of assembly-line expediency is thus calibrated to a quasi-biological understanding of the building as an organism.14 Access for cars and trucks takes place in the lower abdomen and follows the curvy lines of the alimentary canal, whereas above, access for humans is orchestrated “architecturally” as a “purifying procession.” It starts with the two-story “baldacchino” that has the shape of a box, from where people are dispatched over a kind of drawbridge into the exposed belly of the building, where they are then submitted to a succession of cleansing rituals before being handed over to the blessings of charity, amongst them the seasonally-inflected mercy of the unprotected glass wall.
Le Corbusier & Pierre Jeanneret, Section through the Cité de Refuge's “Social services.”
The Salvation Army began marketing the project in terms of machine efficiency, hoping perhaps to convince an audience that was likely to see care as a technocratic problem. They highlighted the project as a “gare de triage” (“marshalling yard”), a “plaque tournante” (“turntable”), or an “organe de distribution et de reclassement en relation constante avec l’Assistance Publique” (“distribution and reclassification body in constant contact with Assistance Publique”). As for Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, recalibrating the machine metaphor in terms of the art and science of human anatomy may have been their way of encouraging “la vieille France” (“old France”) to embrace modernism.
3) The Eclipse of the Health-Machine
According to Beatriz Colomina, architecture can be understood as a therapeutic response to the pervasive—or at least most feared—disease of each era. During the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, tuberculosis was that disease, and the X-ray became Modern Architecture’s prescription.15 If tuberculosis was the topical sickness of the first half of the twentieth century, what about the second half? No doubt, architects still tended to see themselves as doctors, and those for whom they build as patients, but the sickness they are worried about after 1945 was no longer that of 1929. World War II and the triumph of architectural and urbanist functionalism in the decades following it upended the priorities of therapy.
The closed urban block, nineteenth century and contemporary. After Sigfried Giedion, Befreites Wohnen, 1929.
For the avant-garde, in 1929, the closed urban block was a synonym for all that had gone wrong. The crisis of cities brought on by overcrowding and promiscuity was thought to be curable with the multi-story slab apartment building. Half a century later, however, slab housing had itself become a symbol of urban crisis.16 The inadequacies of that type, either real or imagined, inverted the discourse of urban reform. Modernism’s obsession with mapping and zoning, with sorting dwelling standards as well as people into categories—the idea that individuals must be pacified and placed into hygienic cubicles, most often at the expense of the bonds of culture and community—were altogether relegated to architecture’s poison cabinet.17 The dialectic of hospital and city, accordingly, began unfolding in the opposite direction: no longer are instructions issued from the doctor to the city, but rather, interpretations drawn from the dense, functionally diverse, and culturally situated complexity of urban life are being applied to the hospital.
Emmanuel Christ and Christoph Gantenbein, Zurich University Hospital, c.2020. Above, new wings to be built as closed urban blocks. The remains of the existing hospital complex, built 1940-42 as a combination of slabs and pavilions is to be seen below.
In 2020, Emmanuel Christ, one of the architects in charge of the current expansion of Zurich’s Unispital (the university hospital), wrote: “Our project is more an urban intervention than a hospital… It’s an urban intervention that happens to be a hospital, not a hospital that happens to be an urban intervention.” His partner Christoph Gantenbein added: “We are not building a hospital… we didn’t develop a building, but a neighborhood.”18 Does it come as a surprise, then, that as these architects develop new typologies for the hospital, they find them in the closed building block that had been so categorically rejected by their forebears? Herzog & de Meuron, in their recently inaugurated new Children’s Hospital in Zurich, the Kinderspital (or “Kispi”), goes back even further in their search for references, choosing the irregularly meandering medieval city street as a model for the circulation pattern of the new hospital complex. Christine Binswanger, the project architect, explains the scale and shape of the hospital’s internal “boulevard” by comparing it with one of the popular pedestrian streets in Zurich’s Old Town. She sees the unpredictability of urban form as a way of “humanizing” a type of building that is traditionally haunted by monotony, bland design, and bureaucracy.19
Herzog & de Meuron’s preoccupation with the hospital began almost twenty years before the Kinderspital project, with their REHAB clinic for neuro-rehabilitation and paraplegic care in Basel.20 Straddling “a fine line between medical clinic and transit house,” REHAB is an early landmark in what Annmarie Adams has called the “recoding” of healthcare architecture in the years after 2000.21 Set within a rectangular plan, the building has the character of a generous garden pavilion that brings to mind a vacation resort. Built entirely of wood and glass, it is organized as a network of cellular units rigorously organized into a mat-building, but done so in a way that creates the illusion of being freely grouped around a series of garden patios. With the Kinderspital, Herzog & de Meuron recalibrated this design principle for a building twice the size. Here too, the overall organization is basically orthogonal, though the building’s boundaries are stretched and curved so as to mediate between the rectangular mat of the plan itself, the dynamics of circulation, and the hilly topography of the site.22
The hospital as a whole is divided vertically into five floors. The out-patient clinic is on the ground floor; the treatment areas are on the first floor and the wards on the second. Below ground are the services, as well as, at the bottom, parking. Due to the concrete frame structure, each level is to a large degree organized independently, thus allowing for a flexible organization of circulation pattern. However, the series of sixteen rectangular and circular “courts” perforate the building’s volumes and secure the lower floors’ access to daylight.
4) City Miniature
The new Kinderspital brings to mind an intriguing archetype in the post-World War II history of hospital design, Le Corbusier’s unbuilt project for a Hospital in Venice (1964-66).23 At first sight, the Mondrianesque geometry of the ramified building complex, expanding into the lagoon like an exploded checkerboard, seems to have nothing in common with the Kinderspital, given the latter’s demonstratively organoid contours. As an extension of the city, designed to be built not far from the Stazione Santa Lucia and in immediate continuity with the canals and streets of the existing neighborhood, it is almost the opposite of Herzog & de Meuron’s much larger urban transplant. Looking at the elevation, however, one cannot escape the conceptual analogies. Le Corbusier’s complex is organized by three superimposed floors, each approximately five meters high. The first, directly connected with the streets of the Cannareggio neighborhood, is primarily reserved for circulation. The second includes the various care units (medical assistance, preventive care, ophthalmology, oncology, surgery, and so on), each of them designed so they can be easily moved to another location in case of need. Hospitalization, finally, follows on the third floor, the light-catching shed-roofs somewhat prefiguring the ballet of the picturesquely arranged tilted roofs of the wood-clad children’s’ wards of the Kinderspital. The main difference between the two projects results from the topography: as the Venice hospital is planted on stilts directly into the lagoon, the “underground” allows for access and to a certain degree for “parking,” while technical installations like air-conditioning etc. need to be accommodated above.
Le Corbusier himself insists on the urban DNA of the project: “The city of Venice is there and I have invented nothing.” Guillermo Jullian de la Fuente, his partner in charge, is more explicit: “The mere fact [that it is a] ‘hospital’ is almost incidental, it is the integration to the life of the city that matters.”24 If the functional set-up, and even to a certain degree the form, of the Cité de Refuge follows the model of the ocean liner and the “social condenser,” the Ospedale wants to be understood not as an “organism” but as the outcome of a set of structurally defined rules. It is an inward-looking, carpet-like and potentially expandable structure, built in concrete but carefully nestled into the existing city fabric. How much this integration mattered is highlighted by a model that Jullian De la Fuente built after Le Corbusier’s death, at a time when there was still hope that the hospital might be realized. Photos of the historic street façades were glued on the cardboard façades of the model, as if in an attempt to renounce the new building’s claim to its own identity in the city.25
The pairing of hospital and city has unleashed a large body of interdisciplinary scholarship in recent years; the memorable 2022 exhibition Soutenir. Ville, architecture et soin at Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris is a case in point.26 On a practical level, however, the two sides of the equation are still generally thought of as opposites that either need to be kept apart, or on the contrary, to be brought into a working relationship with each other for reasons of accessibility and cost control.27 Both approaches treat the relationship as a problem that must be solved, or at least contained. That both cities and hospitals have been alternately conceptualized by modernism either as “machines” for the production of biological well-being, or as expanding systems of dynamically interacting units, evidently complicates such mating. In Venice, the city is itself a monument and therefore a given social and cultural situation that needs to be taken into account and integrated in the project. In Zurich’s outskirts, there is less built context to reckon with, except for the impressive nineteenth century complex of the nearby Burghölzli, Zurich’s famed psychiatric clinic. In any case, physical context has no part in the striking analogy of the two hospital projects. What connects them is a shared typological genealogy.
Le Corbusier is known to have taken considerable time before accepting the Venice commission. The reason is simple: he knew that building in Venice could only mean working with the existing city, not against it. There would have been no way of envisioning any of those bombastic urbanistic “machines” he had made up for Paris, Antwerp, New York, Rio, Bogotà, etc. But since the early 1930s, his obsession with the tabula rasa as a sine qua non of city building ran in parallel with a curiously sentimental empathy for Venice’s intimate scale and intricate circulation system.28 Be that as it may, with the hospital, the challenge was to invent a way that would continue building Venice without indulging in neo-regionalist mimicry. As Le Corbusier put it: “If one cannot copy its skin, one must respect its physiology.”29
Nor should one forget about some never-realized early Corbusian projects of “villages” organized as horizontal cell-agglomerations (such as a never built student's settlement of 1925). More groundbreaking, however, was the impulse of the legendary CIAM 9 in Aix-en-Provence, held in the summer of 1953. After World War II, some of the organization’s younger members, loosely grouped around Aldo van Eyck, had already begun theorizing a thorough opposition to the functionalist orthodoxy of the organization’s founding fathers, and in particular against the “Charte d’Athènes.”30 The inauguration of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation in nearby Marseilles—one of the reasons for scheduling the Congress in the summer of 1953—thus coincided with a thorough change of direction in CIAM philosophy. The goal was to replace the bio-technical bias of the Athens Charter with a more anthropologically and sociologically grounded “Charte de l’habitat.” Indeed, van Eyck’s experiments with grouping small identical units into “communities” and then repeating these groupings into larger and potentially flexible networks—what he referred to as “configurative discipline“—were not without precursors in Le Corbusier’s work from 1945–48. It is therefore perhaps not so surprising that in Aix-en-Provence, Le Corbusier and Giedion found themselves siding with the younger members’ anti-functionalist impatience.
By 1958, van Eyck’s design philosophy had found its own emblematic built manifesto in his Municipal Orphanage in Amsterdam. Soon later, Piet Blom, one of van Eyck’s students, chose its underlying systematic, expandable configurative model as a base for visualizing what he imagined to be a future urbanization all over the Netherlands. He called it “Noah’s Ark,” and treated it as a thought-model of a future urbanism. Or was it, in fact, intended as an as an actual project? Le Corbusier, alerted to the scheme by Jullian de la Fuente, was intrigued and invited Blom to present the project in Paris in 1964.31 By then, Georges Candilis, one of the master’s long-time partners and project architect for the Unité in Marseilles, had already begun working on the project for the Philological Institute of the Freie Universität in Berlin (together with Alexis Josic and Shadrach Woods), an archetype among projects conceived as a potentially expandable mat-system (1963–73). The Venice project, itself organized as a non-hierarchical web of interconnected circulation spaces and functional and residential units stacked upon each other, thus must be seen as the result of one of the most intriguing proto-post-modern cross-pollinations in recent architectural history.
Herzog & de Meuron is another story. By the time they began thinking about REHAB, twenty years before the Zurich Children’s Hospital, the mat-concept of the expandable city-form as developed by van Eyck and others—most notably Candilis-Josic-Woods—had long been part of the established toolbox of urbanism. While the Venice Hospital project reveals an old master catching up with the avant-garde, the Zurich Kinderspital is a design firm’s situated re-cycling of a design idea borrowed from history, and adapted to a context of logistical complexity that would have been unimaginable in 1965.
5). Coda. The Return of Ornament
Giedion’s erstwhile demand for “Light, Air, Openness” (in Liberated Living, 1929) did not evaporate with World War II. In the 1960s, slab-type housing reemerged with more power than ever, and in hospital design its dominance was more absolute than anywhere else. In Switzerland, the bulky slabs of municipal hospital dormitories built between 1965 and 1975—like Zurich’s Triemli Spital, Lausanne’s Chuve, and Lucerne’s Kantonsspital—occupy their cities’ outskirts like archaic totems of healthcare bureaucracy. Nor is the proverbial visual austerity of healthcare institutions and its sublimation into high tech chic a thing of the past. Set against this background, the demonstratively small-scale wooden surface detailing that is wrapped around Herzog & de Meuron’s entire Childrens’ Hospital is doubly provocative. It seems to contrast both with typological tradition, and with the given context.32
Entrance court of the new Children’s Hospital in Zurich, Herzog & de Meuron. Photo by the author, 2024.
On all three above-ground floors, the spaces that require daylight are arranged along the four façades. Hence the residential character of the complex. Its rustic, even bucolic allure is highlighted from afar in the irregularly slanted roofs of the patient cabins on the second floor, which read to the eye as individual units. One floor down, a similar effect is reached by hiding the window openings behind wooden blinds and railings. The ground floor façade, in turn, is a continuous frieze of small in-between spaces—most of which are inaccessible, thus neither really balconies nor porches, but all orchestrated by wooden cladding like changing cabins in a lido. This emphasis on detail continues in the interior courts, where once again the theme is privacy. Daylight in the spaces opening to those courts is controlled by wooden cornices on the roof level and fixed slanted blinds in front of the windows. The entrance court, highlighted on the façade by a two-stories high symbolic gate, is framed by a semi-transparent “curtain” made of long, preciously shaped boards resembling canoe rudders suspended in a marina’s boat harbor.
Herzog & de Meuron’s interest in wood construction dates back to the 1980s.33 Though regionalist sentiment played no role in their sophisticated laboratory experiments in light-weight construction, analogies with the Swiss “Landi-Stil” of the 1940s are hard to overlook.34 It is tempting, therefore, to consider the Kinderspital’s apparent romanticism against the background of earlier moments of rebellion against “machinism” in hospital design. Zurich’s Unispital is a good example. For the American critic G.E. Kidder Smith, writing 1960, the “large twenty-three-million-dollar hospital complex” was “one of the more important in Europe.” It was built during World War II (1941–53) by a team of architects that included two of the founders of CIAM.35 This pedigree must have made him expect a building in the tradition of the Neue Sachlichkeit, if not of pre-war Le Corbusier himself. As if in search of an excuse for the large but purposefully unassuming complex, with its craft-like detailing and the widespread use of traditional materials (brick and wood), he feels compelled to give a “technical” explanation: “This building was designed and built during the war … when severe restrictions on all materials limited even hospitals to a small scale module with much masonry and wood.”36
Eighty years later, when Zurich’s new Kinderspital was inaugurated, the use of wood in construction was no longer required by restrictions imposed by a war econonomy. As the colossal, de facto six-story concrete frame structure of the complex reminds us, not to mention the baroque pathos of the concrete stairs spiraling up and down the building, neither today’s budgets nor today’s wars preclude the use of concrete. That said, there is also public sensibility to be taken into account. Invoking national identity by ways of architecture is no longer an issue,37 while the evocation of “nature” in public buildings is commonly accepted to be a response to concerns about energy conservation—not to mention that childrens hospitals are also places where families meet, carrying with them a host of lifestyle aspirations, often connected with moments spent together somewhere in the mountains or on a beach.
Looking at the Kinderspital while keeping Le Corbusier’s projects in mind—or vice versa!—may hint at a problem in today’s hospital architecture that is perhaps impossible to overcome. How can the scale and the organizational complexity of today’s hospital construction programs be cast into an architectural form where inside and outside speak the same language, or at least suggest a consistent way of calibrating space in relation to the movement of human bodies? The problem with many “mat” buildings is that their façades become no more than a random segment of the cell-agglomeration to which they belong. The Venice Hospital resolved the dilemma by declaring Venice itself as its façade. As to the “Kispi,” the outside suggests an order that the inside, largely defined by the needs of medical machinery, bureaucracy, services, circulation, and communication, cannot sustain. Does one therefore have to accept that, given the logic of contemporary hospital organization, the “web” model of planning can only work in combination with the “shed” model of architecture? Or could it be that there is simply no alternative, in the long run, to the “decorated shed”?38 In light of such a hypothesis, the Kinderspital may best be understood as a lavishly equipped and beautifully decorated flying carpet that is stopping over on a hillside near Zurich—half way between an architectural fantasy of a city conceived as a web, and a philanthropic organization's demand of a machine that looks like a vacation camp.
Nikolas Pevsner, A History of Building Types (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976), 149-158. Most helpful in preparing this paper were Irina Davidovici’s essay “H: Hospital-as-City: The Healthcare Architecture of Herzog & de Meuron,” in gta papers 5 (2021): 118-131; and a thorough visit to the exhibition Soutenir, Ville, Architecture et Soin, Pavillon de l’Arsenal, Paris, 2022. I am grateful to Adam Jasper for offering me this opportunity to return to the subject of my book Erste Hilfe: Architekturdiskurs nach 1940: Eine Schweizer Spurensuche (Zurich: gta Verlag, 2021), esp. 95-185.
Hubert Damisch, “Noah’s Ark,” AA Files 72 (2016): 115-126; see also Hubert Damisch, Noah’s Ark: Essays on Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).
The Flandre, reproduced in Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture (Paris: Vincent Fréal, 1923), 65, was 140m, the Unité d’habitation in Marseille, which is often compared to an ocean liner, is 138m long.
Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, “Arche Noah,” in Kupfer-Bibel, in welcher die Physica Sacra oder geheiligte Natur-Wissenscaft derer in der Heil: Schrift vorkommenden natürlichen Sachen deutlich erklärt (...), 1731; see von Moos, Erste Hilfe, 95-98.
I cannot presently locate the exact source for this quote. Meanwhile, see Bruno Fortier, “L’architecture de l’hopital,” in B. Barret, A. Kriegl, A. Thalami et.al., Les machines à guérir (Aux origines de l’hôpital moderne), (Paris: Institut de l’environnement, 1976), 71-86.
Le Corbusier, Urbanisme, (Paris: Vincent Fréal, 1925), 157-184.
Sigfried Giedion, Befreites Wohnen 14, (Leipzig: Orell Füssli, 1929). For more references on heliotherapy and housing reform in Switzerland see von Moos, Erste Hilfe, 112-13. For a broader view of the biopolitics of modern architecture, see Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Biopolitics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture )New York: Temple Hoyne Buell Center / Princeton Architectural Press, 2009) and Beatriz Colomina, X-Ray Architecture (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2019).
Sylvie Kahan, Music’s Modern Muse: A Life of Winaretta Singer Princesse De Polignac (Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2003), 256.
Kahan, Music’s Modern Muse, 256; 257.
Kahan, Music’s Modern Muse, 271; 308.
Jean-Louis Cohen, Le Corbusier et la mystique de l’URSS (Paris: Pierre Mardaga, 1987), 154-158; and Stanislaus von Moos, Le Corbusier: Elements of a Synthesis (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2009), esp.148-155.
The first comprehensive study is by Brian Brace Taylor, Le Corbusier: La Cité De Refuge, ed. Bernard Huet (Paris: L’équerre, 1980); the most complete is Gilles Ragot and Olivier Chadoin, La Cité de Refuge, Le Corbusier et Pierre Jeanneret, L’usine à guérir (Paris: Editions du Patrimoine, 2016).
See Gilles Ragot’s detailed account of the controversies regarding the glass wall in Ragot and Chadoin, La Cité de Refuge, 79-93; 100-107. At the time of the opening, the air conditioning did not function; only in 1935 did Le Corbusier agree to the opening of 4 sliding windows in the day-care center and another 37 in the glass wall below.
Ragot and Chadoin, La Cité de Refuge, 34-36; see also Le Corbusier, Précisions sur un état présent de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme (Paris: Vincent Fréal, 1930), 123-126.
Colomina, X-Ray Architecture, 9.
For a history of the housing slab see Florian Urban, Tower and Slab: Histories of Global Mass Housing, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012). For a brief overview of “slab bashing,” see my “The Monumentality of the Matchbox: On ‘Slabs’ and Politics in the Cold War,” in Re-Humanizing Architecture: New Forms of Community, 1950-1970, eds. Akos Moravánsky and Judith Hopfengärtner (Basel: de Gruyter, 2016); and Ákos Moravánszky et al., East West Central: Re-Building Europe 1950-1990 (Basel: de Gruyter, 2017), 255-282.
The critique of functionalist planning became mainstream in architectural criticism by 1970, thanks to books like Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961); Alexander Mitscherlich, Die Unwirtlichkeit unserer Städte (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1971); or Peter Blake, Form Follows Fiasco: Why Modern Architecture Hasn’t Worked (Boston / Toronto: Little Brown & Co., 1974), among many others. However, the erosion of functionalist dogma began within CIAM as early as 1953, and in some quarters a decade before; see below, notes 31, 36.
Annmarie Adams and David Theodore, “Separate and Together: The General Hospital and the Twentieth-Century City,” gta papers 5 (2021), 109-117; 109.
Christine Binswanger, gta Invites: Healthcare, May 5, 2020, ➝.
Gerhard Mack, Herzog & de Meuron: Das Gesamtwerk Band 4. 1997-2001 (Basel / Boston / Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2009), 92-97.
Davidovici, “H: Hospital-as-City,” 127.
The shape of the plan appears to be borrowed from the Laban Dance Center in London, completed in 2003; see Davidovici, “H: Hospital-as-City,” 130.
Willy Boesiger, ed., Le Corbusier: Oeuvre complète, 1957-1965 (Zurich: Les éditions d’ architecture Zurich, 1965), 140-151; Valeria Farinati, H VEN LC Hôpital de Venise Le Corbusier 1963-70 (Venice / Mendrisio: IUAV / Archivio del moderno Accademia di architettura, 1999); Amadeo Petrilli, Il testamento di Le Corbusier. Il progetto per l’ospedale di Venezia (Venice: Marsilio, 1999); Hashim Sarkis (ed.), Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital (Cambridge, MA, 2001).
Pablo Allard, “Bridge over Venice: Speculations on Cross-Fertilization of Ideas between Team 10 and Le Corbusier (after a conversation with Guillermo Jullian de la Fuente),” in Sarkis, Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital, 18-35; 30. I am not able to locate the precise source for the Le Corbusier quote.
Allard, “Bridge Over Venice,” 29.
Cynthia Fleury, ed., Soutenir. Ville, Architecture et Soin (Paris: Pavillon de l’Arsenal / SCAU, 2022).
See in particular Adams and Leonhard, “Separate and Together.”
Stanislaus von Moos, “Le Corbusier, Tourism, and the Myth of Venice,” in Liber amicorum Max Risselada, eds. Dirk van Gameren and Dirk van de Heuvel (Delft: Delft University of Technology / Dept. of Architecture), 46-67.
Allard, “Bridge over Venice,” 29.
For a detailed account of van Eyck’s and other younger CIAM members’ proposed reform of modernist planning strategies, see Eric Mumford, “The Emergence of Mat or Field Buildings,” in Sarkis, Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital, 48-65.
Ibid., 60.
Planning the children’s hospital began in 2014; the building was completed 2024. For references, see above, notes 1, 18-21, and for illustrations, see Herzog & de Meuron (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2024), 130-135; and Axel Simon et.al., “Die Ich-mach-dich-gesund-Stadt,” in Hochparterre 1-2 (2025): 12-21.
Seminal examples are the “Plywood House” in Bottmingen, Switzerland (1984-85) or the Apartment Building along a Party Wall at Hebelstrasse in Basel (1984-88); see Stanislaus von Moos and Arthur Rüegg, Fünfundzwanzig x Herzog & de Meuron (Göttingen: Steidl, 2024), 128-147.
The Swiss National Fair, colloquially referred to as “Landi” in Switzerland, was held in Zurich in 1939. It consisted almost entirely of finely detailed wood-frame pavilions. Critics raved about the rich variety of latticework, grids, surface paneling, etc. as a way of avoiding the “machine”-like anonymity of the “technical style” and as a means of providing diversity and “human scale.” See in particular Peter Meyer in “Architektur der Landesausstellung: kritische Besprechung,” in Das Werk 26, no. 11 (1939): 321-352, esp. 330-339.
See Sonja Hildebrand, Bruno Maurer, Werner Oechslin, eds., Haefeli Moser Steiger: Die Architekten der Schweizer Moderne (Zurich: gta Verlag, 2007), 305-13. The architects’ team (AKZ) included August Arter, Martin Risch, Hermann Fietz, Max Ernst Haefeli, Werner M. Moser, Rudolf Steiger, Robert Landolt, Gottlieb Leuenberger, Jakob Flückiger, Josef Schütz, and Hermann Weideli; of these Werner M. Moser and Rudolf Steiger were founding members of CIAM.
G. E. Kidder Smith, The New Architecture of Europe (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), 298.
As the 1939 national exhibition was open at the outbreak of World War II, its rustic allure came to play its part in what many thought to be the Swiss way towards modernity. See von Moos, Erste Hilfe, 299-307.
See Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), 85-103.
