The house that Roth built for himself in 1960-1961 is situated on Zürichberg, one of Zurich's most privileged residential locations, in the immediate vicinity of the Doldertal apartment buildings, which he had constructed with great success twenty-five years earlier. Another outstanding example of modern architecture, the home of the architects Rudolf and Flora Steiger-Crawford (959), is located just to the south-west of Roth's house. The last of the unique ensemble of buildings on the mountain side of the site is Max Haefeli's house, which is also included in this publication. As a bachelor high school teacher who was well aware of the difficulty experienced by students trying to find living accommodation, Roth decided to design a house not only for himself and his frequent guests, but also to provide a number of students' rooms. The topography of the site, sloping steeply down towards the south, and his desire to preserve privacy and independence both for himself and for the students, led to a storey-based organisation of the rooms. The ground floor comprises the students' entrance, the house-owner's private office (originally used by the students as living and dining premises), and the cellars. The floor above contains five students' rooms with sanitary facilities and working niches integrated into the bay windows of the west façade, a small kitchen with a dining recess, wet cells accessible over a common landing, and the outer entrance to the architect's apartment. The architect's flat consists of a 20-metre-long, open space structured by the cubes of the kitchen and bathroom and the zigzag-shaped picture walls. The high-ceilinged living room with seating accommodation round the open fireplace forms the central spatial focus. A bridge leads from the back entrance to the garden sitting space, and a narrow staircase to the roof terrace.
The structure of the building consists of reinforced concrete and plastered, cork-insulated brickwork. Round, concrete-filled steel columns made it possible to use a wood construction for the projecting, zigzag-shaped west facade, clad on the outside with asbestos cement slabs, with wood panelling on the inside of the student's rooms, and light grey fabric on the picture walls. The non-loadbearing partitioning walls on the students' floor allow easy changes in the scheme. All the windows, built-in furniture and door frames are executed in natural varnished wood, and the other woodwork is left white. The ceilings are painted white and the walls a very light grey so as not to detract from the effect of the numerous pictures. The floors consist of clay tiles on the ground floor, plastic covering on the students' floor, bathrooms and kitchen, with white cast stone in the architect's apartment on the staircase and landing and a dark grey fitted carpet in the living area. The lack of colour did justice to the architect's own furniture from the Wohnbedarf collection, chairs by Alvar Aalto, and paintings by Mondrian, Baumeister, Le Corbusier, van de Velde and others, all of which combined to turn the whole interior decoration into an integral work of art.
The well-proportioned overall composition is founded on a modular system that developed during the design process and is based on the axis dimensions of a student's room. The resulting modular sequence consists of fragments of the basic dimension of 3 metres and its multiples. This procedure facilitated the establishment of the dimensions during planning and finally resulted in a harmonious overall design.
Seen from a typological point of view, the house is reminiscent of the strictly ordered volumes of Le Corbusier's Citrohan House from 1922, open towards the south and accessible by a lateral staircase. But its plastic design goes beyond the volumes of the abstract white cube that Roth realised for his master in Stuttgart in 1927. The building has a sculptural presence created by the zigzag-shaped west facade and the triple staggering of the south wall, expressive elements of design intended by Roth both in a functionalist sense as a precise solution to the lighting of the students' rooms and picture walls, and as sun protection for the exposed valley side facade. This established Roth as an "architect of continuity" who, despite his concern for design, never ceased to be mistrustful of all formalism in post-war modern architecture.
In contrast with the calm and static outer impression, the interior of the architect's apartment presents an organic spatial landscape reminiscent of Wright and Aalto, both of whom had a crucial influence on Swiss post-war modern architecture. Incidentally, Aalto and Roth were united by a close friendship that led, among other things, to architectural collaboration on the Schönbühl ensemble in Lucerne between 1964 and 1967.
With his programmatic "Fellowship Home", Roth generated an architectural type from the synthesis of domestic and social life that corresponded with both his professional intentions and his universal nature. A tireless ambassador of modern architecture, he ran his house as a venue for students, architects and artists until late in his life. His guests included personalities such as Alvar Aalto, Aldo van Eyck, Sigfried Giedion and Max Bill. His essentially well preserved house has been privately owned since his death in 1998. < BACK
David Wyss