The balance between intimacy and interchange: Swiss school buildings in the 1960s

In 1969, in their book New Directions in Swiss Architecture, Jul Bachmann and Stanislaus von Moos qualified Swiss architecture as ‘modest’, despite its refinement and the high standard of the average Swiss building (Bachman and von Moos 1969). This modesty, which in the eyes of the Swiss critics was the price paid for the complicated distribution of competences in the democratic system, was, in international comparison, actually one of its most appreciated features. When applied to school building, particularly, it led to ‘the intimacy of scale and friendly homelike atmosphere’ typical of the Swiss approach (Kidder Smith 1950: 151).