Rasser and Vadi

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Spiegelfeld school building, Binningen Progymnasium 1965
Realschule Breite, Allschwil 1969
Domus House, later Basel Architecture Museum, 1959

Rasser and Vadi were architects who ran an architecture office in Basel from 1951 and created a professionally recognized work over a period of almost two decades.

Max Rasser

Max Rasser (born April 7, 1914 in Basel , † 2000 ) completed an apprenticeship as a structural draftsman after completing an internship in carpentry and bricklaying. From 1933 to 1937 he studied architecture at the Stuttgart building trade school . He received employment with Heinrich Henes in Stuttgart and with Bräuning, Leu, Dürig , with Willi Kehlstadt and with Rudolf Christ in Basel. During the Second World War, as an employee of Kehlstadt, he received a war dispensation because of important federal buildings in Bern. In 1947 he opened his own office in Basel.

Tibère Vadi

Tibère Vadi (born August 5, 1923 in Basel ; † July 20, 1983 there ) was the son of an architect and Basel civil servant. He first completed an apprenticeship as a draftsman at Bräuning, Leu, Dürig. There he worked on the planning of the Basel Citizens' Hospital. He then went to Zug for two years with Alois Stadler , later he moved on to Zurich, where he lived a total of five years and worked for Eberhard Eidenbenz and Weideli and Müggler. There he was also a student at the ETH Zurich . In 1949 he was in Paris, where he attended courses at the Sorbonne. By winning a competition for the expansion of a school facility, he looked for a more experienced partner, Max Rasser, whom he had met a few years earlier in the office of Bräuning, Leu, Dürig.

Office partnership and factory

With this order, which Tibère Vadi had received for the Niederholzschulhaus in Basel-Riehen, and with houses on Spalenring, which Max Rasser had been commissioned to build, a partnership began in 1952, which lasted until Vadi's death in 1984, during which she had many arguments Authorities had to master, as documented in an article about an all too modern single-family house from the early days. Vadi is described in the obituary as a not squeamish person who demanded a lot from his planning and those involved in the planning and who carried through the designs to the last consequence. Rasser took care of the construction and economic efficiency in the office.

Her single-family home on the hillside above Dornach, a composition of two buildings positioned across a corner, found professional recognition. In 1953 Vadi and Rasser won the competition for the city's second outdoor pool after the Eglisee pool in 1932, the St. Jakob garden pool . The jury of this competition at that time still to be had pool Lezigraben known Max Frisch sat. In 1955, the “most modern, but at the same time largest” outdoor swimming pool in Switzerland was opened ( National-Zeitung , July 8, 1955). In a flashback half a generation later, Vadi reflects on the architectural language, which, influenced by concrete art, was understood as an interplay of surfaces standing in space rather than a composition of volumetric bodies. Part of the architecture was also the consistently careful lettering of the complex, a work by the typographer Armin Hofmann .

The office achieved early success with the orders for the Basel Zoo, the Predator House and the Rhino House. The office was then brought in to advise other zoological gardens and in the 1960s built the large facility for elephants and predators for Wilhelma in Stuttgart.

In the meantime, her only contribution to the construction of the hospital, an extension and addition to the women's hospital of the Basel University Hospital from 1958, has been canceled in favor of a children's hospital.

The office in Basel's medieval city center set a strong accent with the Domus office building. The building, which later became the first architecture museum in Switzerland, with its pure curtain wall , which stretches around the street corner almost without profile, exemplified Le Corbusier's ideas of new building such as his domino principle and proportions from the Modulor . Martin Steinmann calls the house, which was restored by Diener und Diener in 1994 , in his essay on form and duration, "to a certain extent transparent": It is timeless in a Loosian sense .

Meanwhile, the office continued to plan schools that had emerged from competition wins, such as the Bottmingen schoolhouse, a two-story building designed around a break hall. The break hall in the Progymnasium Binningen then became the large, central location of the cubic structure, an atrium accessed by stairs, around which the classrooms are arranged. The floor plan is based on an exact square that is divided into four by four fields. This results in similar 8.44 m × 3.20 m fields in the facade. The end faces of the corner-sided classes are closed with exposed concrete, while the rest is completely glazed. A skylight band goes around the whole building on each floor and continues in the interior walls. Four years later, the secondary school in Allschwil was built, the main structure of which is made of glass and stainless steel and sits as a metal box on a recessed base. This technoid impression is also continued in the single-storey annex. The necessary accuracy of the building structure and economic efficiency should be achieved through prefabrication . The unity of the design that was to be achieved in this way extended to the school furniture specially designed for the school.

Plant (selection)

  • Niederholz school building , Riehen 1953
  • Apartment building , Spalenring / Nonnenweg, Basel 1953–54
  • Niederholz Kindergarten , Riehen 1954
  • St. Jakob garden pool , Basel 1955
  • Predator house , Basel Zoo 1955–56
  • Rhino House , Basel Zoo 1957–59
  • Women's hospital , expansion and addition, Basel 1958 (demolished in 2011)
  • Domus , commercial building, Pfluggässlein, Basel 1958–59
  • Shop building with apartments , General Consumers Association (ACV), Rennweg, Gellertareal, Basel 1959–60
  • Schoolhouse , Bottmingen 1960
  • Retirement settlement, Karl-Jaspers-Allee, Gellertareal, Basel 1958–61
  • Spiegelfeld school , Progymnasium, Binningen 1961–62
  • House and studio Moeschlin , Austr., Basel 1964
  • St. Jakob sports pool , Basel 1965
  • School building Breite , Realschule, Allschwil 1967–69
  • Bus depot , Rankstrasse, Basel 1969–70
  • Steel frame house , Hungerbachweg, Riehen 1969

literature

  • Ulrike Jehle-Schulte Strathaus: Rasser and Vadi. In: Isabelle Rucki, Dorothee Huber (Hrsg.): Architectural Lexicon of Switzerland, 19./20. Century. Birkhäuser, Basel 1998. ISBN 3-7643-5261-2 . P. 433 f.
  • Walter Wurster: In memory of Tibère Vadi . In: Werk, Bauen + Wohnen . tape 71 , no. 6 , 1984, pp. 6 ( e-periodica.ch ).

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Competition result: the structural work . In: The work . tape 38 , no. 10 , 1951, pp. 146 ( e-periodica.ch ). Executed building: Ernst Zietschmann: Niederholzschulhaus in Riehen near Basel . In: Building + Living . tape
     8 , no. 10 , 1954, pp. 314-317 , doi : 10.5169 / seals-328784 .
  2. ↑ Max Sulzer: The flat roof or the disrupted building code . In: The work . tape 43 , no. 3 , 1956, pp. 65 , doi : 10.5169 / seals-33266 .
  3. ^ NN: House on the slope in Dornach (Solothurn) . In: The work . tape 40 , no. 5 , 1953, pp. 152 ff ., doi : 10.5169 / seals-30969 .
  4. ^ Ernst Zietzschmann: Gartenbad St. Jakob, Basel . In: Building + Living . tape 9 , no. 5 , 1955, pp. 336 ff ., doi : 10.5169 / seals-329037 .
  5. ^ Erwin Mühlestein: Flashback: Gartenbad St. Jakob, Basel . In: Building + Living . tape 25 , no. 10 , 1971, p. 467 ff ., doi : 10.5169 / seals-334105 .
  6. ↑ NN: Predator House in the Basel Zoological Garden . In: The work . tape 43 , no. 11 , 1956, pp. 348 ff ., doi : 10.5169 / seals-33343 .
  7. ^ NN: Rhino House in the Basel Zoo . In: Building + Living . tape 14 , no. 12 , 1960, pp. 460 ff ., doi : 10.5169 / seals-330503 .
  8. ^ Walter Wurster: In memory of Tibère Vadi . In: Werk, Bauen + Wohnen . tape 71 , no. 6 , 1984, pp. 6 ( e-periodica.ch ).
  9. ↑ Ernst Zietschmann: treatment wing of the woman Hospital Basel . In: Building + Living . tape 20 , no. 2 , 1966, p. 77 ff ., doi : 10.5169 / seals-332506 .
  10. ^ NN: interventions. A typology . In: Werk - Archithese . tape 66 , no. 25-26 , 1979, pp. 50 f ., doi : 10.5169 / seals-50761 .
  11. ^ NN: Office building in Basel . In: Building + Living . tape 14 , no. 12 , 1960, pp. 457 ff ., doi : 10.5169 / seals-330502 .
  12. ↑ Martin Steinmann: Form and Duration: Notes on the architectural thinking of Roger Diener . In: Werk, Bauen + Wohnen . tape 89 , no. 1 , 2002, p. 20 , doi : 10.5169 / seals-66440 .
  13. ^ NN: Primary school in Bottmingen . In: Building + Living . tape 14 , no. 11 , 1960, pp. 414 ff ., doi : 10.5169 / seals-50761 .
  14. ^ Ernst Zietzschmann: Progymnasium in Binningen near Basel . In: Building + Living . tape 20 , no. 4 , 1966, pp. 130 ff ., doi : 10.5169 / seals-332524 .
  15. ^ Tibère Vadi: Prefabricated school building . In: Building + Living . tape 24 , no. 2 , 1970, p. 57 ff ., doi : 10.5169 / seals-347771 .
  16. ↑ Hans Bieri: School Furniture Today - Repression or Liberation? In: Building + Living . tape 25 , no. 1 , 1971, p. 3 ff ., doi : 10.5169 / seals-333969 .