Carl Zehnder

Karl Theodor Zehnder (born December 15, 1859 in Illnau , † July 25, 1938 in Münchenstein ) was a Swiss architectural theorist, draftsman and architect.

Life

Carl Zehnder came from a respected family of doctors in Zurich. He first studied architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology , with Gustav Gull , Georg Lasius and Friedrich Bluntschli , among others . This was followed by a stay in Paris, in the studio of Jean-Louis Pascal at the École des Beaux-Arts . After traveling to Italy from 1886–87, he worked for two renowned architects in Germany until the mid-1890s, with Georg Frentzen in Aachen and with Paul Wallot in Frankfurt. When he returned to Zurich in 1896, he was initially an assistant at the local arts and crafts school, where he also taught from 1897 to 1902 and was the director of the affiliated trade museum . After his resignation he moved first to Zollikon and in 1906 to Basel.

Zehnder, who worked for the most successful and best-known architects of his time, did not build his own building. In 1888, participation in a competition for street candelabra in the city of Frankfurt and also for the Augusta memorial in Koblenz is documented. From the same year until shortly before his death, he made a plethora of drawings depicting ideal architectures that are in the tradition of drawings by Renaissance and Baroque artists such as Pozzo , Bibiena and Piranesi . He was able to show his drawings in 1906 at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition, 1908-09 at the St. Gallen Art Museum and in 1920 at the Zurich Museum of Applied Arts.

literature

• Verena M. Schindler: Zehnder, Karl Theodor In: Isabelle Rucki and Dorothee Huber (eds.): Architectural Lexicon of Switzerland - 19./20. Century Birkhäuser, Basel 1998. ISBN 3-7643-5261-2 . P. 578
• C. Zehnder, painter - architect 1859–1938. Ideal architectures . Exhibition at the ETH Zurich 1981. Organization for architecture exhibitions at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, Zurich 1981, ISBN 3-85676-016-4