Armin Meili

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Armin Meili (born April 30, 1892 in Lucerne ; † October 21, 1981 in Zurich ) was a Swiss architect and politician .

Life and professional biography

Meili was born the son of the architect Heinrich Meili (1860–1927) and the pianist Emilie Meili-Wapf . After graduating from high school, he studied architecture at ETH Zurich from 1911 , where he obtained his diploma under Gustav Gull in 1915 during the active service that began in 1914 . From 1915 to 1917 Meili was an assistant at Karl Moser's chair . After winning the competition for the Protestant Reformed Church in Solothurn from among 160 participants in 1917, he was a partner in his father's architectural office, which he continued to run alone from 1924. In 1936 he was appointed director of the 1939 Swiss National Exhibition .

Meili's work as director of the national exhibition ("Landi"), which was considered to be an expression of spiritual national defense , was rated very positively at the time. In the work Swiss Heads of the Present , published in 1945, Meili is described as the “magician who created this huge national show with ingenious intuition and planning” and praised his “organizational and artistically unsurpassable design of this great national rally” . The publicist Charles Linsmayer has recently questioned this assessment critically . In an article in the newspaper Der Bund 1997, Linsmayer describes Meili as a man who "was very close to fascist thinking in many respects" and takes the view that the concept of the state exhibition ultimately worked towards an attitude of mind that was supposed to be combated. Meili deliberately excluded the avant-garde of art from participating in the national exhibition, according to Le Corbusier , whom Meili counted among the “great national figures”.

From 1939 to 1955 Meili was a national councilor of the FDP and, as such, dealt primarily with questions of spatial planning and regional planning . In 1940 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich . In the Swiss Army Meili did his service in the artillery and in the general staff , from 1938 he held the rank of colonel , where he was appointed commissioner for fortifications in 1940 . He found his final resting place in the Friedental cemetery .

Architectural work

Reformed Church Solothurn

Even before the reformed town church in Solothurn was completed in 1925, a large number of projects were published under his name in his father's office, of which the small workers' housing estate Daheim in Malters and the Friedberg housing estate in Lucerne found their way into the specialist literature to have. In 1926 he also presented his own house in the trade journal Das Werk , which was followed by another house in 1930, which now sought to reconcile pre-modern traditions with the principles of New Building .

At the end of the 1920s, he won the two most important competitions held in Lucerne after the First World War , and was thus able to shape the further urban development of Lucerne: in 1929 the competition for the Lucerne city plan, which came into force in 1933 after revision , and in 1930 the competition for the art and congress house, which was built until 1933. The Wagenbach fountain from 1934 and the landing bridge from 1936 have been preserved from Meili's original design of the area . The art and congress center, on the other hand, was expanded by Meili himself in 1970-72, whereby the clear structural shape was lost, was demolished in 1996 and replaced by the new Lucerne Culture and Convention Center by Jean Nouvel . Meili built numerous other churches, residential and commercial buildings, hotel buildings, factories and military buildings. Reformed church buildings by Meili stand next to Solothurn in Wolhusen , Reiden , Dagmersellen and Beinwil am See .

The Centro Svizzero in Milan , built by Meili in collaboration with the Italian architect Giovanni Romano from 1949 to 1952, is considered “one of the most important works not only by the architect, but also of Swiss post-war modernism as a whole”.

The Martinsberg community center of the BBC in Baden

Own writings

  • Laurels and hard nuts. From the work and diary of a confederate. Artemis, Zurich / Stuttgart 1968.
  • Structural renovation of hotels and health resorts. Verlag für Architektur, Erlenbach-Zurich 1945.
  • Country planning in Switzerland. NZZdruck, Zurich 1941.

literature

  • Isabelle Rucki, Dorothee Huber (Hrsg.): Architectural dictionary of Switzerland . 19./20. Century. Birkhäuser, Basel 1998, ISBN 3-7643-5261-2 .
  • Hannes Ineichen, Tomaso Zanoni: Lucerne architects . Architecture and urban development in the canton of Lucerne 1920-1960. Verlag Werk AG, Zurich / Bern 1985, ISBN 3-909145-06-X .
  • Philippe Carrard (Ed.): Meili, Milan and the skyscraper . the Centro Svizzero di Milano 1949 - 52nd gta, Zurich 2002, ISBN 3-85676-108-X .
  • Martin Schwander, Hans-Peter Wittwer (ed.): The architect Armin Meili (1892–1981) and the Lucerne Art and Congress Center . on the occasion of the exhibition 1933–1993: 60 Years of the Lucerne Art Museum in the Meili-Bau in the Lucerne Art Museum, April 20 to May 2, 1993. Lucerne Art Museum, Lucerne 1993, ISBN 3-906700-60-7 .

Web links

Commons : Armin Meili  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Solothurn. Protestant church. (No longer available online.) In: Die Schweizerische Baukunst, Volume 7 / Jg. 9. 1917, p. 76 , archived from the original on April 2, 2016 ; Retrieved December 5, 2009 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.e-periodica.ch
  2. ↑ a b Armin Meili. In: Swiss Heads of the Present. Volume 1, Zurich 1945.
  3. ^ A b Charles Linsmayer: How the Landi became a "national sanctuary". In: The Bund. November 22, 1997.
  4. ↑ Meili, Armin. In: Swiss biographical archive. Volume 2. EPI, Zurich 1952.
  5. ↑ Hannes Ineichen, Tomaso Zanoni: Lucerne architects. Architecture and urban development in the canton of Lucerne 1920–1960. Verlag Werk AG, Zurich / Bern 1985, pp. 34–35.
  6. ^ Reformed church in Beinwil am Hallwilersee: Arch. Armin Meili, Lucerne. In: Schweizerische Bauzeitung, Volume 109/110. 1937, pp. 6-8 , accessed November 29, 2009 .
  7. ^ Centro Svizzero, Milan. In: arch INFORM ; Retrieved November 29, 2009.
personal data
SURNAME Meili, Armin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss architect and politician
DATE OF BIRTH April 30, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Lucerne
DATE OF DEATH October 21, 1981
Place of death Zurich