Ballenberg: a vernacular architecture museum. My first visit to the open-air architecture museum at Ballenberg, Switzerland took place during my first year in architecture school at the EPF-Lausanne. It was one of the few required excursions during my studies, and, with discernable reticence, we embarked on several buses to travel from Lausanne to visit one of Switzerland’s national treasures.
The buildings at Ballenberg
Situated in Brienz in the German speaking part of Switzerland, the museum features regional buildings acquired from around the country. The collection includes farmhouses, barns, granaries, and bakehouses; all meticulously dismantled, transported, and reassembled at the new idyllic site. Each structure is magnificent in its own right, and expresses a model of life, a principle of settlement, and an economy of means; values that I have come to see as central to Swiss architecture, or at least any architecture worth discussing.
Similar to an architectural lexicon, these vernacular buildings showcase traditional building materials (wood, stone, and lime), covering materials (straw, shingles, and tiles), and modes of living arrangements that are specific to one of the twenty-six cantons that form the Confoederatio Helvetica (the country’s official Latin name).
Switzerland and its context
Switzerland is situated in the center of Europe and has three different climatic zones -the Alps, the central plateau, and the southern region of the Italian speaking canton of Ticino. In addition to the need to address these considerations, the country has four different languages, each tied to a region, coupled with an inviolable sense of neutrality among its citizens—a stance that is being challenged with the new geopolitical situation in Europe given the war in Ukraine.
As young architects, even before we visited Ballenberg, we were taught to pay close attention to context within distinctive landscapes and to consider vegetation, climate, seasonal temperatures, winds orientation, and rain direction, in order to interpret those constraints according to long proven traditions. Reflecting on my first visit to Ballenberg, I am reminded of the importance of the traditional crafting of these attractive rural buildings.
Vernacular and indigenous architecture remains a constant source of inspiration as I practice and teach. This emotional and intellectual stance has little to do with the post-modern movement and its often-coined neo-vernacular, a style favored by British architect and critic Charles Jenks. Vernacular architecture was instilled in us students as an honest approach to the art of building, and I owe much of this lifelong mindset to my first-year Professor Frederic Aubry, and his First Assistant Plemenka Soupitch.
My foundation year in architecture
It was Aubry’s genius (and I mean that) to devise a unique first-year educational model at the EPFL that circumvented the traditional focus on basic design issues, many of which are still in place at US Schools of Architecture. The traditional focus was more or less an exclusive formal and visual manifestation camouflaged behind “design principles”. I will be honest and say that Aubry’s position was unpopular at the time among die-hard modernist and post-modernist faculty; not to mention among us first-year students, as we did not yet have an understanding of the scope of such a profound initiation.
What we learned during that first semester at the EPFL prepared us to be attentive and selfless architects. Not artists, but architects in a true Vitruvian sense of the word. Thus, with time I am convinced that no other educational system could have imparted us with fundamentals for the practice of architecture with such passion, commitment, and clarity of intention.
Two different pedagogies
Contrary to the strategy set in place by Aubry of an education based on design principles taught through architectural artifacts, the first-year curriculum at the ETH-Zürich—the other polytechnic school and considered Lausanne’s big brother—was led by former Texas Ranger Bernard Hoesli who was also an apprentice of Le Corbusier. We knew about him, and envied Hoesli’s innovative curriculum and strong pedagogy that was guided by his tenure in Texas with colleagues Colin Rowe, John Hejduk, Robert Slutzky, and Werner Seligman. But with time and trust we slowly identified with Aubry’s educational strategy, one that was unique and avant-garde in the middle of Hoesli’s Anglo-Saxon strategy and our own traditional French polytechnic pedagogy.
For Aubry’s colleagues, studying vernacular architecture was an afront to the discipline and was perceived by many as a blunt abandonment of the lineage of history and theory that made the discipline of architecture worth studying. We could hear behind closed doors: how dare could he introduce to first year students design concepts where the architecture could be understood and learned by craftsmen who were not formally trained as architects?
Frederic Aubry and his vision
Retrospectively, this unease may have come from a sincere position for faculty, since postmodernism was in full swing. Architects acted like kids in a candy store distorting politically correct forms to create a new language away from modernism. For many faculty it was impossible to not succumb to the temptation to quote and bluntly spread their knowledge through historical precedence, thus Aubry’s vision was far from what was de rigeur at the school. Faculty had a position and as aspiring architecture students we were in the midst of those debates, and it was exciting and inspiring.
For Aubry, rather than exploring a set of exercises in first year that examined type-problems (aka, Hoesli) that were based on compositional principles of modernist space making theories, his approach was to immerse students by revisiting Durand’s comparative studies of seminal buildings. Aubry’s approach was similar, with the important difference that the buildings we analyzed were not part of the iconic repertoire of “known architecture buildings”, but instead, relied on the relevance of vernacular structures that were, by definition, conceived by non-architects. Looking back, Aubry’s approach was authentically polytechnic as he updated learning outcomes based on the 19th century traditional approach to teaching architecture.
Later I further learned to appreciate this approach when, for two consecutive summers, I accompanied a group of faculty and students to prepare documents for the next group of first year students. We had to learn how to measure and record vernacular buildings, provide details and any pertinent information that the first-year students would need during their analysis project. Many of the buildings were selected because of possible demolition due to their poor physical state, thus the work of the first-year students was part a preservation act that created one of the most famous and respected vernacular centers of study in Europe.
Architecture (A) versus architecture (a)
For us as students, this instructional methodology was new and nonconformist—an idea which we somewhat came to like because being rebellious is part of wanting to create something new. We also took part in the unfortunate ridicule that emerged from our childish interpretation of the French word vernacular. We wanted to be architects, thus we questioned what did farm buildings have to do with architecture?
Over the year, it became clear that if we seriously wanted to understand the practice of architecture in all its forms, it was important to recognize that ancestral building gestures such as setting stones over stones, creating shelter, and protecting oneself from the outside elements, were a cultural act, and did not need treatises to explain the origin of Architecture as described through the primitive hut.
While Aubry’s erudition was built on a profound respect based on an inherited academic tradition—he was a student of Jean Tschumi who established Lausanne’s polytechnic architecture program and who was the father of Bernard Tschumi—he was committed to challenge what he perceived to be the arrogance of a formulaic approach to form making that gave little understanding to students of the trilogy between man, nature, and materials (Image 6, above).
Vernacular architecture as a pedagogy
In a previous blog, I have spoken of my first-year experience in Lausanne, and described the significance of the diagram seen above on the right (Image 6, above). I will include some of those thoughts here:
“While I have seen many thought-provoking diagrams on the nature of architecture, the particularity of the diagram [above] displays fundamental concerns that shape man’s physical environment. The tripartite division formed around the circle expresses the interconnectivity of a design process that extends the basic functional and utilitarian needs of daily human activities. This created an environment balancing economic, social, and emotional needs, as well as cultural aspirations that must negotiate the qualitative with the quantitative.
This holistic interpretation of architecture based on vernacular architecture was presented to us as students during our first analysis project. Within the context of learning about indigenous buildings, faculty stressed the importance of societal organization and hierarchies (space making), and the rights of its members to enable possible and desirable relationships between groups (place making). Specific site conditions, and to a larger degree everything that embraced the meaning of context, were chosen for each function and ritual in order to enhance the individual and the community at large.
In this instance, architecture was taught as being able to translate certain ideals and reflected the thoughtful integration of those aspirations within expressive, plastic, and symbolic dimensions. As a result, architecture was both an aesthetic and functional environment created within the trilogy of theme, nature, and construction. This unfolds in space (physical and cultural); in time (history and theory); and in materiality (technical and cultural). The cycle of architecture in this diagram became primordial, diachronic, and ephemeral in each of my subsequent design projects…”
Ballenberg: construction and detailing
The vernacular buildings were both simple and majestic as volumes, remarkable within their new site. The buildings combined domestic and rural programs (home and barn), making for some very attractive architectonic structures (see above images). Their simplicity was striking, although at closer look, one could not fail to notice a level of detailing that showed a deep knowledge of construction. This is what impressed me the most. At times, the academic world of architecture was incorporated; much as I would discover later in Kentucky, where buildings at the Shaker village were influenced at key spatial moments by a British style (i.e., the spiral stair in the Trustee’s building at Pleasant Hill).
My first foray into construction and detailing emerged from Aubry’s sensitivity towards a more humble and authentic architecture. Retrospectively, there was perhaps a climate that was auspicious for this way of thinking in the early 1980s. Carlo Scarpa died in an accident in 1978, and many of my faculty became enamored with his work; thus, a quasi-universal curiosity and respect by both faculty and students for Scarpa’s cultural way of detailing his buildings. Both my introduction to vernacular architecture and to Scarpa’s world of Architecture gave me a sense of the necessity to think in terms of construction, and this at any scale and development of my architectural process.
Conclusion
I learned that in an academic setting there is never a correct moment to introduce the complexity of being an architect, especially now that I have been teaching architecture for over three decades. There are learning objectives that guide faculty for each of the years they teach in. These agreed upon goals give direction and outcomes that ensure to a certain degree that student learning is comparable across years. More important is the classroom dynamic and its overall preparedness. For me, it is about the student’s arrival in second year—the year I favor teaching. Faculty learn to be nimble in navigating how students respond to specific program briefs, and at times, change course to allow more time to assimilate new knowledge.
While I like to argue that the act of building should never equate to a simplistic summary of the discipline of architecture, I do believe that the earlier students can be sensitized to appreciate a culture of construction, the better prepared they will be as architects. The need for construction and detailing should not reflect changing accreditation requirements. This reminds me that when I was introduced to Louis I. Kahn’s work and discovered how his early sketches conveyed the magic moment where ideas about space were intimately linked to how they would be built, I started to think like an architect. Beyond Kahn’s brilliance in organizing the plan, there was always an underlaying understanding that buildings were about the art of building.
Postscript
During my studies, this particular focus on the art of building was conveyed to us through the study of vernacular artifacts, all the while we learned how to draw, to conceptualize, and to develop iterative processes. Understanding construction as an underlying principle took time as pure design seemed easier and more self-gratifying. It was another pedagogical strategy where we students did not have a choice to embrace or reject the integration of construction in our projects. We did not miss this pretend freedom, as we learned that building is a commitment that has an impact well beyond our own selves.
Other blogs of interest on vernacular topics and others
Additional images taken from Ballenberg
Lessons from vernacular architecture—inventing versus re-inventing
Le Baron Tavernier: a café terrace in the middle of the Lavaux vineyards, Switzerland
Casa Rezzonico by Livio Vacchini, Switzerland
Culinary memories from Switzerland: THE canapé