Apartment buildings in Doldertal

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South facade of the living rooms on Lake Zurich
The side rooms are located down to the Wolfbach
The bedrooms are on the Doldertal spur road

The Doldertal apartment buildings are a residential complex designed by the architects Alfred and Emil Roth with Marcel Breuer from 1935/36. You stand on the slope of the Adlisberg high above Zurich in the Doldertal section of the Wolfbachtobel .

Building description

Two similar, three-story steel frame buildings each house a large apartment on the two main floors. The cuboid main volume of the building with the living rooms and bedrooms is extended towards the Wolfbach with a prismatic building that contains the staircase, kitchen and balcony. The recessed top floor with two roof studios each complements the building dimensions sculpturally. The two garages are located next to the entrance in the basement level down the valley.

Location and building history

The Doldertal is one of the many ravines that cut deep into the moraine hills east of Lake Zurich, which were smoothed by ice age glaciers. In the posh suburb of Wipkingen in the 1930s, Sigfried Giedion , later professor of architectural theory and doyen and pioneer of new building , had a long meadow above his villa, which he wanted to build with apartments for the upper middle class .

To this end, in 1932 or early 1933, he initially made the property available to the architect Alfred Roth with his cousin Emil, whom he knew from the Werkbundsiedlung Neubühl , as he called it. That meant that the financing was unclear. In July 1933 he suggested bringing in Marcel Breuer, who was a frequent guest of the house. Breuer, who was responsible for the expansion of the Zurich and Basel stores of Wohnbedarf AG , had written a cry for help from Berlin, which had just become Nazi.

In addition to the desire to create an example of the style of living that he propagated, financial considerations also played a role for the private scholar who lived on his fortune at the time. This dilemma is well described in a letter from the client to the architects from March 1933:

“For me, the property represents an asset that I will have to realize in the very near future, be it through sale or development.
When the project was worked through three times, the use of the property was reduced each time. It has reached the last acceptable limit so that I cannot do without using the roof areas. On the other hand, it does not occur to me to build houses with steep roofs or to operate other camouflage with the help of which, as is well known, a much greater use of the 'roof extension' would be approved by the authorities. "

literature

  • Christa Zeller: Swiss architecture guide; Volume 1: Northeast and Central Switzerland. Zurich: Werk Verlag 1996. ISBN 3-909145-11-6
  • Florian Adler, Hans Girsberger, Olinde Riege (HG.): Architecture Guide Switzerland . Zurich: Les Editions d'Architecture Artemis ext. New edition 1978, ISBN 3-7608-8004-5
  • Arthur Rüegg: The Doldertal houses. A major work of New Building in Zurich . Zurich: gta Verlag 1996, ISBN 978-3-85676-070-0

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ clarification regarding the buildings in the doldertal , in: Rüegg p. 32
  2. ↑ A. Roth private archive, in: Rüegg p. 35

Coordinates: 47 ° 22 '23.3 "  N , 8 ° 33' 53.7"  E ; CH1903:  685,062  /  247531