This special house reminds me of my German immigrant grandparents’ house on Mount Carmel in Haifa, which they built in the early 1950s inspired by German Modernist houses they had seen when living in Munich before immigrated to Palestine. This masterpiece that the modernist architect couple Flora Steiger-Crawford and Rudolf Steiger (parents of the architects Martin Steiger and Peter Steiger) built for themselves in the Doldertal suburb of Zürich, Switzerland in 1959 is the subject of a new book.
This monography by Marianne Burkhalter & Christian Sumi with fabulous photography by Leonardo Finotti (published by Lars Müller Publishers) also discusses the so-called Doldertal Apartment Houses, designed by architects Alfred Roth, Emil Roth, and Marcel Breuer in the 1930s, which is considered among the most important built works of “Neues Bauen” in Switzerland and was commissioned by Swiss architectural theorist Sigfried Giedion, who lived there as well. Twenty years after Giedion’s project was completed, Rudolf Steiger and Flora Steiger-Crawford (who was the first woman to receive a diploma in architecture from ETH Zürich) built their prinstine house. Steiger was one of the architects of the Neubühl housing estate built in Zürich in the early 1930s and was responsible for other avant-garde private houses as well as the Cantonal Hospital in Zürich.
The new monograph “The Steiger House. Doldertal Zurich 1959: Rudolf Steiger and Flora Steiger- Crawford” offers a first in-depth look at the genesis of this masterpiece of modern Swiss architecture. Detailed analyses illustrate the central layout and outline the chronology, typology and construction of the building. Further contributions illuminate the relationship to local topography, the cultural context of the building, as well as important historical and contemporary architectural references, including the Steiger House’s famous neighbors.
