- Bernhard Hoesli - collage and architecture

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F. LEGER “The Gray Root” c.1953 B. HOESLI “No. 13” c.1964 Formation of Pedagogy Bernhard Hoesli was born on January 13th, in 1923 in Zurich, Switzerland to parents that owned a road construction company. After earning a degree in architecture from ETH he began working at Le Corbusier’s studio in Paris and Marsaille. While in Paris he studied painting under Fernand Leger who is largely responsible for the development of the Section d’Or, or Golden Section. Leger’s mentorship left evidence in some of Hoesli’s earlier collage works like No.13. Here similarities arise in the balance between the shallow and deep space. Through a diagrammatic lens both compositions are arrangements of figures, relatively in the same plane, in front of a secondary field. Both also have a major and minor grain, which begins to speak to the overlapping nature present in so many of Hoesli’s collages. Bernhard Hoesli Monograph: Kevin Pappa Bernhard Hoesli Monograph: Kevin Pappa
In 1951, he began his influential career in education by becoming a professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. Alongside Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, the Texas Rangers changed the face of architectural education in the United States and Switzerland. Rowe and Slutzky’s definition of transparency laid groundwork for Hoesli’s teaching curriculum based on the use of precedents. At Texas a major pedagogical goal was identifying and teaching the language of Modern Architecture, and cubism was a key to that language. The normal precise wash renderings at the Ecole de Beaux Arts led to an architecture lacking in rigor. He began to rationalize and propagate the works of Cezanne and other cubists as a new language for demonstrating that rigor. Flattened, angular, and spatial abstractions of the space-mass continuum led to more justifiable compositions. Hoesli believed that cubism’s synthesize of figure and field rather than its fracture was the requisite characteristic of Modern Architecture. In 1956 the director of the School of Architecture at UT resigned causing a fallout of many of the Texas Rangers. Hoesli returned to Switzerland and began teaching the first year courses at the ETH in Zurich. From 1959 until 1981 he directed the first year design program – the Grundkurs – at the ETH. Hoesli’s pedagogical revolution became part of the permanent structure of the curriculum as he involved himself in practically all aspects of the architecture program. At the same time, he ran a Zurich firm with Werner Aebli between 1960 and 1970 while also serving as Chairman of the Architecture Department of the ETH. In 1972, he barely survived nearly fatal injuries from a car accident until his unexpected death in 1984. He was 61 years old. Bernhard Hoesli Monograph: Kevin Pappa
Page 1: “Transparency arises wherever the
Page 5 and 6: “So a collage is not only meant a
Page 7 and 8: In collage No. 26 a scaled hierarch
Page 9 and 10: Interpretation At the foundation of

- Bernhard Hoesli - collage and architecture

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