The architecture of Max Bill

by Federico Bucci

Max Bill Arquitecto, 2G, n. 29-30, 2004, Editorial Gustavo Gili, Barcelona (pp. 276, € 25,00)

The book New directions in Swiss architecture, published in 1970 by Jul Bachmann and Stanislaus von Moss for a series dedicated to national identities, opened with the image of the pavilion constructed by Max Bill in Lausanne in 1964, for the Swiss National Exposition. The book’s authors commented that the event highlighted an incurable contradiction within the country.

On one hand there was the attempt to transmit the image of a democratic Switzerland devoid of social tensions, and on the other hand it appeared impossible to hide – in the lively Sixties political climate – the embarrassing issues around women’s right to vote and the fate of foreign workers. It was above all the Swiss intellectuals who called out for a public declaration on the Confederation’s future, beyond typical products, political neutrality and the sanctity of banking secrets. “Achtung: die Schweiz” was the title of the pamphlet in which three well-known exponents of Swiss culture, among whom the writer Max Frisch, an architecture graduate, proposed the construction of a veritable “new city” to substitute the pacifying technological hypocrisy of the Lausanne Expo.

In claiming the right to the dream, the new directions formed around these experiences in reality put the very foundations of modern architectural tradition in crisis, which in Switzerland could count on loyal guardians of a certain international calibre such as Sigfried Giedion, Alfred Roth and not least Max Bill. The star of Max Bill had quickly started to shine in the glittering European world. Born in Winterthur in 1908, Bill went to the School of applied arts in Zurich and in 1927 he entered the Bauhaus. The teaching received in Dessau without doubt constitutes the fundamental roots of his work.

Painter, sculptor, architect, graphic artist and critic, Bill represents the image of the complete artist that the avant-garde in the Thirties laboriously tried to assert in a Europe torn by “political difficulties” and on the verge war. In 1932 Bill established the base for his professional activity in Zurich by constructing an extremely modern house-studio. Zurich became the centre of a wide range of realisations that led the artist to Paris as member of the Abstraction-Création group, or to Milan where the Swiss pavilion he designed for the VI Triennale aroused much interest for its innovative ability to organise space around communications needs.

The field of exhibition design seems particularly congenial to the multiform outcomes of Max Bill’s creative route. The projects for the Swiss pavilions at the Paris expositions (1937) and New York (1939), at the Venice Biennale (1951) and the Milan Triennale (realised in 1951), the “Die Gute Form” exhibition in Basel (1949), the Ulm pavilion at the Stuttgart exhibition (1956), are the works in which Bill bears witness, as Maldonado writes in a short monograph dedicated to the Swiss artist in 1955, “a new kind of open and dialectic coherence: a real plural unity”. Maldonado’s judgement and the entire discussion on style broached by that essay published in Argentina is still today a useful key to understanding Max Bill’s work.

Everything originated from a very particular experience such as the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, the art school founded in 1949 by Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher, exponents of the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany. Constructed by Max Bill between 1950 and 1955 and under his direction for a year before his controversial resignation, the school found in Maldonado the undisputed main character of its most heroic season. Maldonado explains that the Max Bill style “is neither dogmatic nor closed. It is instead a coherent, constructive style, and at the same time essentially creator, always assisted by imagination and surprise. In other words, in Bill the desire to conform does not prevail over the desire to form. His style is both responsible and free. It is a style of times to come because, contrary to expectations, the future will not create a hermetic culture static in time.”

Faced with these words, which are to be contextualised with the particular climate of the time, a book that only deals with Max Bill’s architectural activity proves to be irreparably lacking in the complexity (we use the term that Vittorio Gregotti used to define the Swiss artist’s work in a article written for Casabella-continuità) necessary to understand his work. This is what happens with the monographic edition that the review 2G dedicates to “Max Bill Arquitecto”, continuing the tradition of historical studies.

The texts are excellent (by Stanislaus von Moss, Hans Frei, Karin Gimmi, Arthur Rüegg and Jakob Bill), the archive documentation is adequate (conserved at that Vegap in Barcelona, but without a note explaining the substance) and the photographic campaign on the current state of the works is very rich and even overly detailed. Finally, there is a substantial anthology of writings (stained only by the absence of a bibliography) in English and Spanish. But one question weighs on the entire book: how is it possible to isolate architecture from the rigorous research on the relationship between form and function that Bill pursued during his life?

By leaving aside Max Bill’s paintings, sculptures, industrial design and graphic art work, one also loses sight of the creative path of an artist whose beliefs founded on mathematical power are shattered, beginning with the Ulm experience, against the new feeling for the subjective dimension that all Europe, Switzerland included, was calling for. In this age when we archive, catalogue and conserve everything in museums that even recent history has left us, historical research should be much more cautious and be aware that the past cannot be interpreted with the present habit of mind. An archive is not enough to write a monograph.

Federico Bucci Professor at Milan Polytechnic

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