WRIGHT ANGLE

A fascination with an American modernist master played a crucial role in the development of a little-known Swiss architect's geometrically sophisticated portfolio

- ADAM STECH

At once brutalist and organic, the Zurich home of the late architect Andres Liesch sits in what feels like an epicentre for Swiss modernism. In the affluent district of Hottingen, a couple of neighbouring streets, Doldertal and Bergstrasse, have come to define the country's 20thcentury architectural trajectory through a series of landmark buildings.

First, seminal architectural historian and critic Sigfried Giedion commissioned Marcel Breuer to build a pair of small apartment buildings on Doldertal in 1936. After the war, architect and ETH Zurich professor Alfred Roth built his own house a few metres away, on Bergstrasse. His colleagues, Flora Steiger-Crawford and Rudolf Steiger, followed suit with their own house in 1959. And this group of important modernist works was then completed during the early 1970s by the little-known Liesch, who contributed a cascading concrete apartment building, with his own three-storey residence at the top.