When I saw this house, my first thought was: “I’m glad I don’t have to pay their heating bills.”
Perhaps that is why the “Private Museum” in the Heidi Weber House was only open during the summer months, if at all, because it would have been too expensive to heat.
The house is located at Höschgasse 8, near the eastern shore of Lake Zürich. It was built starting in 1964 on a plot of land belonging to the City of Zürich, on the basis of a fifty-year leasehold. At the end of the fifty years, in 2014, the land and building reverted to the city, as stipulated in the original leasehold, but not without a series of bitter legal disputes that continued until at least 2021 and were not always understandable to outsiders.
The original contents of the building, including furniture and lighting designed by Le Corbusier and numerous sketches, photos and documents, remained the property of Heidi Weber (*1927), and she had them all removed in 2016.
From 2017 to 2019, extensive renovation works were carried out, and the house reopened in 2019 under the auspices of the Museum für Gestaltung (Museum of Design). But it is still only open during the summer months, because it would presumably still be too expensive to heat during the winter.
Sign on the former Heidi Weber House, now Pavillion Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier, whose real name was Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, was born in the French-speaking part of Switzerland in 1887. He later lived in France, and became a French citizen in 1930. He was famous during his lifetime as an architect, designer, urban planner, writer and painter. His work at the time must have seemed ultra-modern, futuristic, even progressive, since he claimed to be interested in improving the living conditions of the poor.
City planning to Le Corbusier consisted of tearing down historic city districts to make room for huge skyscrapers intertwined with huge freeways so the automobile could be the main form of transportation. In the second half of the twentieth century, numerous cities throughout the world implemented his ideas, leading to the unlivable urban wastelands and high-rise slums that we all know today.
Nonetheless, I wouldn’t mind having a look at the Pavillion Le Corbusier, so the next time I’m in Zürich during the warmer months I’ll ride by on my bicycle and see if it’s open. (If not, I’d at least like to visit the atelier of the sculptor Hermann Haller, which is next door and is scheduled to reopen in 2025.)
My photos in this post are from 2010. I revised the text in 2023.
See more posts on Zürich, Switzerland.
See also: By train to Lille, France.
When I was a child, some magazine, possibly Nat. Geographic, did a feature on Le Corbusier’s Chapelle Notre Dame de Ronchamp that looks like a nun’s wimple. I was fascinated as a child and swore I’d visit someday. We finally did in 2002 and I loved it. It’s small and very quiet inside but quite dramatic on the hillside as you approach it. I’ve never cared for the other things of Corbusier that we’ve seen. They are too angular for my personal taste. I like softness and curves.
The city also had responsibility to protect the historic buildings. I still like Le Corbusier’s furniture designs.
I agree some of Le Corbusier’s ideas on urban planning caused some nightmarish developments, but I like his work on individual buildings much better, so I’d be interested to visit this.
I am happy that it is not only me to NOT appreciate the “genius” of Le Corbusier 🙂
But, as per Murphy’s laws, we need to cool down as it could always be worse.
The New (!) Bauhaus will be the new building standard, as the big boss encouraged us to adopt it 🙂
I assume that sooner or later those “energy inefficient buildings” will be destroyed, even if we like them or not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYFojt2zi9w&t=106s