Pierre Zoelly. Elements of an Architect's Language book is a square of side 30 cm. It contains predominantly photographs, drawings printed in red, all at 500, even very large splash, and some photos in color, stretching for over half a meter, you suck in your pages.
The subject is the architecture, even fifty years of architecture of its author. Hundreds of different works, from residential buildings, museums and parts of cities are presented through a few words: mountain, trees, paths, choreography, brick, steel, glass and wood. The model of self-presentation of his works invented by Le Corbusier (see the 'Oeuvre complete in horizontal A4 format, clarity and completeness of documentation, organization projects, dialogue in the third person) is overturned.
Here a sketch of a mountain takes up three quarters of the current page and next to it are pictures of houses built in the pyramids of the Alps On the "trails" is the inside of a subway station, in that " tree canopies bus, the "roof" of tensile structures, shells or houses. The photographs and drawings are decked with short texts (in English, French and German) with aesthetical, technical, philosophical, autobiographical or working (for example, "the character of a roof can be read on its board).
Turning the pages is an event full of surprises. Whenever we find a different, an assembly that makes us think. A tree inspires a structure rooted in the ground, rising up with shelves, the basilica is a path, a mountain a layered section, a scale the need for a symbolic arrival, a fissure or a crack in the anticipation of a drama, wood texture , concrete strength, the brick versatility, the steel skeleton, an energy icy glass, light magic. And then the issues of concentricity, modulation, the clash between old and the choreography: where life, architecture interior and exterior spaces blend and move as one on the final page where the author shows "spontaneous graphs - the psycho - in which different forces are in report, and in which everything moves. "
is overwhelmingly a book of pictures. But beware, the image is the way for an architect-builder as Pierre Zoelly, thinking, indeed they are.
short, what really happens in this book? We can look for a key preface by Mario Botta, or the same author, but they both are on ' understatement. Instead, it is worth emphasizing, this book is particularly valuable, such as quality the architecture it presents itself.
Zoelly Pierre is an architect substantially ignored by international stardom for his ask for the media with a sense of aristocratic superiority.
He graduated in 1946 in Zurich and then studied at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh. He lived in the United States for a decade, teaching in Ohio and pursuing a busy career. Makes wooden or reinforced concrete shell structures, and projecting lattice and creates interior spaces that are moving away from the reassuring domesticity American state - even with the extensive use of steel in the furniture - the themes of "machine living ".
Back in Switzerland in the early sixties and in recent years began his expressive maturity that coagulates around three pillars: First, the expressive development of the construction process, with a slope very similar to that of architects like Renzo Piano and Norman Foster, then the architecture industry, the thermo-electric station in Zurich to the place of disposal of Glarus, and finally study of underground structures, which is a leading expert.
These themes reappear in the design of stations and transport interchanges, rail in two important achievements. In the Watch Museum in La Chaux-de-Fonds, creates an underground facility with a linear development of beams that emerge from the earth with the undulating rhythms of water in a pond. In the museum of the Red Cross in Geneva, the visitors reach the plaza outside the building through a crack in the hill, then they are led below to view a history of hopes and tragedies. A skylight illuminates the statue of the founder, Henry Dunant.
These museums, like the beautiful and somewhat Scarpian Gallery of Folk Traditions in Fribourg, are among the most intense and dramatic built in the eighties. In parallel Zoelly constructed an exemplary project on derelict land on the shores of Lake Zurich, blending new homes, offices, a museum around the partially restored, partially remodeled, some added the mill Tiefenbrunnen. In
volume illustrates these works, along with many others and a complete bibliography allows the further deepening of individual projects. But the book still has a clue. To draw or better to track, not so much the results of a life of work, but the strength and the very joy of their vision of the world.
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