Pfister brothers

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The Swiss architectural office Gebrüder Pfister consisted of Otto Pfister (born December 31, 1880 in Fällanden ; † May 7, 1959 in Zurich ) and Werner Pfister (born April 27, 1884 in Fällanden; † February 11, 1950 in Zurich). In the first half of the 20th century , the brothers ran the architecture firm with the most orders in Zurich and their buildings played a decisive role in shaping the appearance of the city.

Enge station, Zurich (1925–1927)

Life and education

Otto and Werner Pfister were the sons of elementary school teacher Jakob Pfister (* 1849, † 1927) and his wife Lina Pfister-Hotz (* 1857, † 1926). In 1885 the von Fällanden family moved to Zurich.

Otto Pfister

Otto Pfister attended secondary school and then completed an apprenticeship as a bricklayer. From 1899 to 1901 he completed the construction technician class at the Technikum Winterthur . After several positions with construction companies, he was a specialist auditor at the ETH Zurich , where he studied with Alfred Friedrich Bluntschli , Gustav Gull and Karl Moser . After studying at the Polytechnic, Otto Pfister went to Karlsruhe , where he worked from 1904 to 1906 for the architectural office of Robert Curjel and Karl Moser.

In 1908 Otto Pfister married Anna Magda Sulzberger (* 1886, † 1969). The marriage produced a daughter and three sons. The family lived together with Otto Pfister's parents-in-law in a life and work community for thirty years. Otto Pfister died on May 7, 1959.

Werner Pfister

Werner Pfister attended the drawing teacher class at the Zurich School of Applied Arts , but dropped out because he was not convinced of the training. After completing a one-year internship as a bricklayer, to which he was persuaded by his brother, he attended the construction technician class at the Technikum Winterthur from 1899 to 1902. There he was tutored by Robert Rittmeyer . In 1905 Werner Pfister also moved to Karlsruhe after his brother Otto found him a job with Hermann Billing .

Werner Pfister remained unmarried. He died on February 11, 1950.

Joint architecture office

After their return from Karlsruhe, the brothers founded their own architecture office in 1907. This step took place after they had achieved their first competition successes and received an order for a block of flats in Zurich. Otto and Werner Pfister maintained a certain division of labor, which resulted from their different talents: the former mostly created the idea sketches, brother Werner worked on the explanations. The employees of the architecture office had a strong say in the developed solutions. Between 1907 and the 1940s, the Pfister brothers were able to realize a large number of buildings in the city of Zurich as well as in other cantons. In the crisis years of the forties, they had to lay off the majority of the employees and - also due to their age - handed over more skills to Kurt and Hans, two of Otto Pfister's sons. The architectural office was very successful until 1950, the year Werner Pfister died.

Stylistic classification

Swiss National Bank, Zurich (1919–1922)

The Pfister brothers left behind an extensive body of work that ranges from single and multi-family houses, school buildings, hospitals, department stores, administrative buildings to power plants and bridges. The sheer number and diversity of the projects that have been tackled makes it difficult to classify them, all the more since their work spans several decades. Until the 1920s, the work of the Pfister brothers can be classified as part of the national romanticism , which combines the local Swiss architecture and Art Nouveau . The Peterhof and Leuenhof offices are examples of this phase of style and creativity. Later, the Pfister brothers turned to the New Objectivity through classicist designs (e.g. the building of the National Bank in Zurich) . From the 1930s onwards, the projects developed became more objective, bringing the Pfister brothers closer to a moderate modern age . A new tradition of technical building is characteristic of this style, whereby the elements of the new building are only included selectively. Restraint, adaptation and ambivalence are not only typical features of the Pfister brothers' building, but also characteristic of the Zurich architectural landscape at the time. Radical modernism was only able to spread little in the city of Zurich, which can also be attributed to the people who reject the new and the unfamiliar, but who turn to traditional values ​​and traditional security. The Pfister brothers, who were born in the last 19th century, were not committed to any ideology, but were pragmatists with an unspectacular, solid and solid construction and did not provoke with extreme solutions.

Meaning and criticism

SUVA building, Lucerne (1914–1915)

The contemporary architecture criticism came not entirely conclusive: The criticism reached a hand of "the most important private architects Zurich in the first half of this century" and "creators of buildings of consistently high quality," as on 13 February 1960 in the NZZ the assessment of Peter Meyer read. Karl Moser, on the other hand, wrote in a letter to Le Corbusier that the Pfister brothers' work was exhausted in a “médiocrité et insuffisance”, that is, an average and inadequacy.

Although the Pfister brothers had designed many important buildings and Zurich trademarks (such as the Walchehouses of the cantonal administration and the Zurich Enge train station), a corresponding reprocessing in architectural historiography was missing until the new millennium. This may be due to the fact that protagonists of New Building (such as Otto Rudolf Salvisberg , Hans Bernoulli , Lux Guyer ) were preferred to representatives of a more traditional building method. It was not until around 1980 that massive and solidly constructed buildings that did not feel obliged to modernism and thus not to the principles of objectivity and functionalism were again valued.

Association of Swiss Architects

In 1908, the Pfister brothers were founding members of the Association of Swiss Architects (BSA).

Buildings (selection)

Peterhof and Leuenhof, Zurich (1912–1914)
Ryburg-Schwörstadt power plant (1927–1930)
Cantonal administration of Zurich (1933–1935) and Walchebrücke (1911–1913)

Other work

  • Collaboration in the design of the coaches for the Zurich city bus line, 1927
  • Interior of the tram motor car type Elefant for the Zurich tram ( Verkehrsbetriebe Zürich ), 1930
  • Design of the interior of the dining car of the SBB and the Rhaetian Railway (RhB), 1943–1944

Well-known employees of the architecture office (selection)

literature

  • Dominique von Burg: Gebrüder Pfister - Architecture for Zurich 1907–1950 , ed. in cooperation with the Cantonal Monument Preservation of Zurich, Verlag Niggli AG , Sulgen 2000, ISBN 3-7212-0379-8 .
  • Dominique von Burg: Gebrüder Pfister. In: Isabelle Rucki and Dorothee Huber (eds): Architects Lexicon of Switzerland - 19./20. Century , Birkhäuser Verlag , Basel 1998, ISBN 3-7643-5261-2 , p. 416 f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Dominique von Burg: Gebrüder Pfister - Architecture for Zurich 1907–1950 , Verlag Niggli AG, Sulgen 2000, p. 9.
  2. ↑ a b c From national romanticism to a moderate modern age. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung. October 15, 2001, accessed February 23, 2014 .
  3. ^ Dominique von Burg: Gebrüder Pfister - Architecture for Zurich 1907–1950 , Verlag Niggli AG, Sulgen 2000, pp. 24–25.
  4. ^ A b c Dominique von Burg: Gebrüder Pfister - Architecture for Zurich 1907–1950 , Verlag Niggli AG, Sulgen 2000, pp. 31–32.
  5. ^ Dominique von Burg: Gebrüder Pfister - Architecture for Zurich 1907–1950 , Verlag Niggli AG, Sulgen 2000, p. 26.
  6. ^ Dominique von Burg: Gebrüder Pfister - Architecture for Zurich 1907–1950 , Verlag Niggli AG, Sulgen 2000, p. 10.
  7. ^ Dominique von Burg: Gebrüder Pfister - Architecture for Zurich 1907–1950 , Verlag Niggli AG, Sulgen 2000, pp. 16–17.
  8. ^ Dominique von Burg: Gebrüder Pfister - Architecture for Zurich 1907–1950 , Verlag Niggli AG, Sulgen 2000, p. 51.
  9. ^ Dagmar Böcker: Otto Pfister. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . September 28, 2010 , accessed February 23, 2014 .