I cringe every time I see them hacking up some parcel of agricultural land, the same land that land grabbing companies, countries and speculators are buying up elsewhere in the world (but this is another theme alltogether).
We've seen some scary examples of cementification in Lugano and its immediate vicinity - historic lakefront villas being torn down only to be replaced by yet another condo, historic villages flanked by concrete opprobrium (e.g. Bré sopra Lugano)...
Ciao
Paul
Surely you know by now that the masses should be housed in, er, invisible housing?
Perish the thought that the large numbers of people who live in the urban parts of Switzerland should actually be allowed to live in apartments that we can see! What a blight! Little boxes on the hillside, etc etc...
The snobbery on this forum really sticks in my craw sometimes.
If people want to see old wooden houses, they should come out to Glarnerland. There are no jobs or anything, like, and the canton is rapidly losing both money and people, but so what? It's still pretty, and that's what matters, eh?
Smh.
I guess that with such an abundance of older buildings they are concentrating on keeping the best examples. The demand for modern accommodation and offices etc. has to be met somewhere. Switzerland has a very limited area available for development.
If some of the older properties were not redeveloped, the alternative could be spreading further into the countryside.
The UK situation seems to encourage properly speculation more, with buildings being either left to rot or only seeing low levels of usage (for example a shop on the ground floor but the storeys above derelict) with the main part of the profit the owners are making not being in the rental or usage but in the increased value of the land.
Nice buildings like the two ones on Bärengasse even were moved over to a new location as they were immaculate. Mum was enthusiastic about that rescue as she had lived in those quarters 1943-45
Most of the buildings that are build are build to be economical and solve peoples needs. As you don't see many ferraries on the streets so you don't see many beautiful buildings. Many of them are cheap and done for people who don't care where to live or who can't afford to care.
We architects also know what was done in past is not to be repeated. If you copy the style of renaissance painters you can sell things only on village fair. Copying architecture works maybe for Disneyland and if you really like this you can go to Vegas. No self respecting designer/engineer/artis who put at least some of intellectual effort into his field will do this. But you have a lot of amateurs who tries.
In Switzerland you have many beatufill architectural renovations, like St.Gotthard hopsice . You also have modern architects like Zumthor or Caminada who spent big part of their life learning how to work with materials and are able to spend time and energie to tune their work to local area and at the same time bring out something new.
So usually for us is: protecting is ok, faking is very wrong. Often we have to work with someone who wants to build cheap but it shouldn't look cheap. Try to buy a cloth like this. If you don't have a lot of taste it will end with a catastrophe.
But seeing the style of boxes with sqaure windows and flat roofs was invented around the 1920s by the Bauhaus movement and people like Corbusier, how would you stand to the accusation that all modern architects are living in a Bauhaus Disneyland just copying that stuff to nausea. It may have been ground breaking almost 100 years ago, but today its just cheap and ugly and the more it is repeated, the cheaper and uglier it gets. There are many buildings in places like Zürich where you cannot for the good of it see whether that piece of concrete was put there in the 1930s or the 1960s or 2010s because flat roofs and rectangular windows are flat roofs and rectangular windows.
You don't have to precisely copy old stuff but you can go to it for inspiration and make something new that does hommage to the old. The Victorians also looked to medievil Gothic for inspiration just as the Georgians looked to the Renaissance and the Classics, and this essentially spilled over into Art Nouveau and Art Deco, as witnessed by for example some of the classic skyscrapers in places like Chicago. But that does not by any stretch make Downtown Chicago a Disneyland of classic European architecture. On the contrary.
Allone this year (January and February) it was 27 new 458, 1 new California, 7 new F12, and 7 new FF. Additionaly 2 new Gallardo and 4 new Granturismo.
http://www.auto-schweiz.ch/fileadmin...ellePW2014.xls
Total for 2013 was 359 new Ferrari on the Swiss roads compared with only 774 and 831 new ones in Germany and Great Britain respectively (2012 numbers).
I'm going to stick to my "drafty old wooden hut"
In kanton Bern it is like NEJC wrote "Switzerland has an established system of protecting its built heritage. It works on different levels, but they protect individual buildings and built landscape. It works differently depending of Gemeinde and it is linked with their democratic system. Protecting is often in conflict with owners and developers."
I was for some years on the control of the protected buildings. I can only say, in our area if somone wants to change a protected building, they have a very hard time ahead.
If you can read German here is a good example. http://www.blick.ch/news/schweiz/aar...id2767169.html
Salut Zämma
I just don't like bashing of something that (as i think) people usually don't even try to understand. Modernism was great leap for the quality of life and with it architecture finally catches industrial era. It went awry, it was left on scrapyard of history and it was tried to be replaced with many so called styles in 80 and 90, like post-modernism, deconstructivism etc. But actually it didn't realy ended, its concepts are still evolving and it doesn't mean just cubics.
Halem is another example of modernistic architectural and social experiment that still thrives, more then 50 years after it was build. Go there once in summer and you will see that is possible to have a "Scandinavian" way of life in Switzerland, that you don't have to be afraid of old raw concrete and living with nature was also modernists ideal.
Just another thought: old housing has their own proportions and master use of material. You can see it was an era when every piece of wood or stone was used with a lot of thinking and great care. We can see this and we value this. Today it is easy to use machine cut pieces of wood from mega-stores or using Styrofoam moulds for stucco. Usually it is overdone. There is no more mastery in that kind of building. From far away you don't see this, but as you move closer the illusion falls away.
I can reply for Ferraris but your anecdote is better than the way I express my point, so I will stay corrected and put more effort into writing next time.
Modernists tell us that in their theory and philosophy, form follows function, and therefore anything that has no function (such as a decoration) should be left away. In reality this is of course nonsense. Many modernist buildings have fake structural elements attached such as girders that have no purpose in the statics. This is the styropor that you would criticise if it was rococo but welcome if it is rectangular and goes with your flat roof and rectangular windows.
Many things about modernist architecture are pretty un-functional. A flat roof for example is not very functional. It needs to be repaired frequently, it gets hot in the summer etc. So it's not that the form follows the function but that the function is being overridden to meet the form that some architect thinks is cool - of course an architect who has gone to architect school and been brainwashed by older architects to the point that he is unable to imagine anything else.
This is the problem. Architects can only think like architects and cannot begin too understand how other people see their work. As you yourself say, people who criticize them are amateurs. They don't understand. They are too stupid to see what a wonderful thing a box of concrete is and how even more wonderful ten thousand identical boxes of concrete are.
I think Douglas Adams once summed it up very well. He explained that in modern architecture, the form must serve the function. Therefor in the airport you can see all the heating ducts as they must be functional, but you cannot find the way out because it isn't. This just shows how often modernist architects span the cart before the horse and make stuff that's so functional that it's useless.
I'll be honest, it really is simple: The population of Switzerland is growing. If you do not want to ruin the landscape by putting a house on every patch of land will you need to condense living space. This means tearing down old large single standing houses and replace them with blocks of flats. No, they don't look better than the old house, but still better than an old house and twenty more on the last green pieces of your village... The level to which this is happening in Switzerland is rather moderate compared to most other suburban areas in western countries. I found my Swiss urban apartments actually quite uplifting as they were very well thought through.
Only thing depressing was
a) the sense of fashion of the interior architects (a black kitchen top, really? Have you ever cooked? Oh, and a mirror behind the cook top is idiotic as well...).
b) the most depressing children playgrounds I have ever seen. Looks like safety standards these days mean they have to build them like a padded cell.
I agree that some Swiss apartment blocks are ghastly, but still better than the wild spreading housing you have in some part of Ticino which really ruined some of the lakes, no? It's easy to complain, but much harder to come up with constructive suggestions.
Nevertheless, the lack of imagination how to style the exterior of the shoebox is obvious.
Sure in the cities its OK but how these buildings get planning permission is way beyond me. I am guessing there is a lot of nepotism or joint business interests between the swiss construction industry, the banks and Kantonal Government.
Flat roof could be smart. Because they take much less volume than classic one. Building that is 20 meters wide will have 8-10 meters high roof. That space is harder to use and you will have much more shadow on neighboring plots. Pitched roof that has unused space beneath it, provide isolation and another level of moisture protection. If you have apartment there, you have exactly the same problems as with flat roof. It all depends how good things are done. So, flat roof could be good or could be bad, but you cannot say that it is bad by itself.
This is again such a broad generalization that I will reply: 'Yes you are partly right, but on a whole you are completely wrong'
Yes you believe that, because you accepted many things that you hear are true. Usually it is just a pile of hearsay. like the things about roof and Styrofoam. I don't think you are stupid (as you said that we architects think), but it is because you don't try to understand things, you don't inform yourself about it and you don't think about them.
This is also completely utterly wrong, read some essays on art at least. Btw, architecture is not art.
My opinion is that, it is wrong to label things and generalize. Are cheap houses ugly? Yes most of them are, especially when they are done by lazy architect. But it doesn't matter if they have flat or pitched roof. Also faking is wrong, but actually we will always found traces of it everywhere. Again it doesn't matter if faking is square or circular.
Architecture is solving technical problems inside the frame of investor's wishes, economical soundness, solving social problems and finally to satisfy personal esthetic views. So actually we can never be satisfied with our work, but we can also easily dismiss too - simplified arguments.