Jacques Gros

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Jacques Gros: Grand Hotel Dolder around 1900

Jacques Gros (born October 23, 1858 as Friedrich Jakob Gross in Landstuhl , † October 18, 1922 in Meggen ) was an architect of historicism .

Life

After attending school in Basel, the gardener's son completed an apprenticeship at Rudolf Aichner's Basel construction business. At the same time he trained as a draftsman at the drawing and modeling school. In his six-year employment with Aichner, among other things, in 1875 he was busy building the new theater , as well as brewery, hotel, commercial and residential buildings. From 1880 he continued his education in France and Germany. From 1884 to 1887 he was employed by Nicolaus Hartmann in St. Moritz . He then worked for a parquet and chalet factory in Sarnen for three years. During this time he was responsible for the construction of power plants and railways on the newly emerging Bürgenstock . In 1890 he founded his own architecture company in Zurich . Coming from Graubünden , he specialized in the construction of chalets , villas, country houses, hotels and exhibition halls: in 1894 he was appointed chief architect of the cantonal trade fair. His main work is the Waldhaus and Grand Hotel Dolder in Zurich. The so-called forest castle in Waldshut also attracted attention . He built in the Swiss wood style or chalet style, which was popular at the time, and was decisively influenced and promoted by the ETH professor Ernst Georg Gladbach and his farmhouse research. In the mixture of forest house romanticism with formal elements of the Bernese farmhouse , he let the castle romanticism flow as required . His works are probably also influenced by neo-Romanesque . He published his buildings and designs, often in painterly form, in various writings. From 1890 to around 1907 he erected a large number of buildings of all types, but he probably made many wrong business decisions. He did not succeed in turning to reform architecture, namely the Jugendstil and Heimatstil. From around 1910 he was largely forgotten and hardly received any more commissions. In 1916 he had to sell his villa on the Zürichberg and at the end of his life he became a construction manager for his brother-in-law, the Lucerne architect Emil Vogt .

Works (selection)

buildings
  • Chalet Alpenrose , Zurich 1891–92
  • Chalet Ulrich Wille , Bern 1892
  • Cantonal trade exhibition , Zurich 1894
  • Waldhaus Dolder , restaurant and station building, Zurich 1895
  • Grand Hotel Dolder , Zurich 1897–99
  • Villa Sonnhalde , Zurich 1899
  • Heinrichshorst , hunting lodge, Angern 1899
  • Waldschloss , brewery and restaurant, Waldshut 1899–1903
  • Villa Kiev , Zurich 1910–11
  • "Chalet Spörri", Flums 1896
Own writings
  • Sketches for residential and country houses, villas etc. Two editions: Ravensburg 1897 and 1903
  • Wooden buildings, chalets and various Swiss architectures. Stuttgart 1901
  • Album for the chalet factory KLuoni & Cie in Chur. Two editions n.d.

literature

  • Dieter Nievergelt: Gros, Jacques . In: Isabelle Rucki and Dorothee Huber (eds.): Architectural Lexicon of Switzerland - 19./20. Century Basel: Birkhäuser 1998. ISBN 3-7643-5261-2 , p. 231 f.
  • EV (= Emil Vogt ): Jacques Gros . Necrology. In: Schweizerische Bauzeitung . tape 80 , no. 20 . A. & C. Jegher, Zurich November 11, 1922, p. 233 ( e-periodica.ch [accessed on July 2, 2015]).
  • Dieter Nievergelt: The historicism architect Jacques G. In: Zürcher Denkmalpflege , report 10, part 2, 1986, pp. 86–95

Web link

Individual evidence

  1. An article from 1979 wrongly names the city of childhood, Basel, as the place of birth, see: Dieter Nievergelt: Kantonale Gewerbeausstellung Zürich 1894, in: Our art monuments: Bulletin for the members of the Society for Swiss Art History, Issue 4, 1979. In: www .e-periodica.ch. Pp. 411-421 , accessed April 4, 2016 . The author corrects himself in the architectural dictionary and Dieter Nievergelt: Jacques Gros. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .