The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - Have we ever been postmodern?
Date: Tuesday, 31 August 2021 to Tuesday, 31 August 2021
Time: 12.00 to 13.00
Location: https://ethz.zoom.us/j/66678778806
Conversation with Elli Mosayebi and Christian Inderbitzin (Edelaar Mosayebi Inderbitzen Architekten), moderated by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen, gta Exhibitions, ETH Zurich, and a welcome address by Samuel Schweizer, Ernst Schweizer AG
To coincide with the event, we are happy to be able to present a virtual exhibition with pictures by the photographer Gion von Albertini: goodbadugly.gta.arch.ethz.ch
For a considerable length of time Swiss architecture has been dominated by the image of a “heroic period” in the 1990s, often at the expense of excluding its immediate predecessors. For us, however, architects such as Pierre Zoelly, Theo Hotz or Tilla Theus are of particular interest in that they demonstrate other, different scenarios in postmodernism or the interrogation of modernism. Our focus under the title The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a choice of trajectory that represents a turn in Swiss architecture in the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, the architecture of this period exhibits (almost) none of the common clichés in the postmodern language of forms. With an eye to the present, the suspicion might even be that this formal absence unleashed an even more effective, more subversive transformational energy. The heroes and heroines of the period broke a spell that at the time gravitated around the use of historical forms and working with so-called “references”.
With this walk through Zurich we warmly invite you to re-look at what we might otherwise bypass as our all- too-familiar architectural surroundings, as well as to re-read them in the context of the current architectural discourse. With buildings, amongst others, by Theo Hotz, Ernst Gisel, Eduard Neuenschwander, Tilla Theus, Justus Dahinden, Pierre Zoelly, Esther and Rudolf Guyer, Hans Fischli, Knapkiewicz & Fickert and Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani.
Supported by Ernst Schweizer AG