Horace Edouard Davinet

Grand Hotel Schreiber, Rigi Kulm (1875)

Horace Edouard Davinet (born February 23, 1839 in Pont-d'Ain , † June 30, 1922 in Bern ) was a French-Swiss architect .

life and career

The son of a mayor attended school in Bourg-en-Bresse . After he often lived near Bern after his mother's death, he began an apprenticeship with his brother-in-law Jakob Friedrich Studer in 1856 , where he worked on the planning of the Federal City Hall in Bern, the luxury hotel Bernerhof there and the new hotel buildings in the Bernese Oberland, the Grandhotel Giessbach on Lake Brienz and the Jungfraublick in Interlaken.

1862-64 he got a job in Stuttgart with Wilhelm Bäumer , who at that time built the Damascus Hall of Wilhelma in Cannstatt. Back at Studer in Switzerland in 1864 because of the Grand Hotel Victoria in Interlaken, he founded an office in Interlaken with it in 1866 and soon took over sole management there. The Hotel Oberländer Hof and Beau Rivage in Interlaken , the Hotel Victoria in Bern, the Grandhotel Schreiber on Rigi Kulm and the Grand Hotel in Seelisberg date from this time, when he was the most productive and sought-after hotel architect in the Bernese Oberland . In 1876 he moved the office back to Bern, at that time he planned the Kirchenfeld as an architect, entrepreneur and speculator , for which he had already presented an initial plan in 1859, and from the 1880s onwards he increasingly built villas for the Bernese upper class.

Monument to Horace Edouard Davinet at the Grandhotel Giessbach

In 1891 Davinet was appointed director of the Bern Art Museum ( Inspecteur du Musée des beaux-arts ), to which he devoted himself mainly in the following years. With this concentration on the visual arts, the management of the office gradually passed to his great-nephew Fréderic Studer , who became a partner in 1904 and took over the office in 1913.

Davinet became an honorary citizen of the city of Bern in 1900.

Selected Works

Image of the Beau-Rivage in Interlaken on a bond

• Damascenerhalle and Wilhelma guest house , Cannstatt, 1862–64 (in the Bäumer office)
• Hotel Victoria and Hotel Jungfrau, Interlaken, 1864–64 (construction work, with Jakob Friedrich Studer, according to plans by Robert Roller )
• Beau-Rivage in Interlaken
• Grandhotel Giessbach in Brienz
• Planning overbuilding of the Kirchenfeld in Bern
• Villa Zurbrügg, later known as the Dépendance Hotel Blüemlisalp, was built in Aeschi near Spiez in 1865

literature

• Roland Flückiger: Davinet, Horace Edouard. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Roland Flückiger-Seiler: Davinet, Horace Edouard . In: Isabelle Rucki and Dorothee Huber (eds.): Architectural Lexicon of Switzerland - 19./20. Century. Birkhäuser, Basel 1998. ISBN 3-7643-5261-2 , p. 142 f.
• NN: Edouard Davinet . In: Schweizerische Bauzeitung . tape 80 , no. 2 , 1922, p. 22 ( e-periodica.ch ).

Web links

• Holdings on Horace Edouard Davinet in the catalog of the Burgerbibliothek Bern