#rudolf steiger

MFH Hohenbühlstraße, apartment buildings Hottingen - Zürich, Switzerland; 1950-53

Max Ernst Haefeli, Werner M. Moser, Rudolf Steiger (photographs by Erica Müller-Rieder)

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Zurich‘s Doldertal boasts some of Switzerland‘s finest houses: the apartment house by Alfred & Emil Roth with Marcel Breuer, Alfred Roth’s Fellowship Home and also the house of Flora Steiger-Crawford and Rudolf Steiger, completed in 1959. The architect couple conceived the house over a two year period between 1956 and 1958 but some elements already present in Flora Steiger’s first sketch never changed, namely the hexagonal central space as the anchor point of the house and the three rooms radially grouped around it with recessed terraces set between them. That the architects nonetheless drafted many variations shows a recently released publication dedicated exclusively to the building: „The Steiger House. Doldertal, Zurich 1959“ by Marianne Burkhalter & Christian Sumi, published recently by Lars Müller Publishers, provides an all-encompassing history of this remarkable house. Around Leonardo Finotti’s brilliant photographs the book gathers texts by, among others, Arthur Rüegg and Dieter Kienast as well as plenty of archival material that highlight the sophistication of the Steigers’ design. Part of the former is the complex spatial relationship between the different rooms and the central space from where, when all doors are open, the outside green is visible. These vistas are made possible by an elaborate, visible and invisible structure that also accounts for the house’s seemingly floating appearance. Over the course of the design process the horizontal elements of the load-bearing structure were increasingly pronounced while their vertical counterparts faded into the background. Only in the mise-en-scène of the entrance do they appear as sculpturally formed Y-shaped columns oscillating between Corbusian pilotis and industrial mushroom columns.

MFH Hohenbühlstraße, apartment buildings Hottingen - Zürich, Switzerland; 1950-53

Max Ernst Haefeli, Werner M. Moser, Rudolf Steiger (photographs by Erica Müller-Rieder)

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