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Chapter 2 The Genesis

Bernhard hoesli and the Process of Design

It is the spring of 1982;the venue,the auditorium of the School of Architectre,University of Texas at Arlington.Bernhard Hoesli is speaking to a capacity crowd;his first lecture in Texas since his departure from Austin in the summer of 1957. I have arrived late, having driven the 350miles from San Antonio to the Dallas-Fort Worth area.Though there is a substantial contingent of young architecture students for whom the lecture is only one of a series,glancing around I reacquaint myself with the older faces;the balding,graying heads in the hall----Duane Landry and Jane Lorenz Landry,Bill Odum,Bill Booziotes,Rik Mcbride,and many,many others---all former students of his,and…show more content…
In 1944 he graduated from the ETH in architectur.Following the war,in 1947,he left Zurich for Paris where,after briefly working in the atelier of the painter Fernand Leger,he was accepted by Le Corbusier as an assistant at the Rue de Sevres.There he wasassigned two projects that were to figure heavily in his later thinking as a teacher and acrchitect.In1948 he worked on the design of the Villa Currutchet located in Rio Plato,Brazil;and in 1949 Le Corbusier,obviously impressed with the abilities of this neophyte Swiss architect,appointed him project architect for the United Habitation,relocating HoeslitoMarseilles to manage and oversee the construction there of his own first major postwar work*2. The Villa Currutchet,a small urban infill project containing office and living quarters,epitomizes a type of Corbusian synthesis that had its origins in the Maison Domino and the Villa Carthage of the 1920s,that is,the combination of the plan libre and the L-shaped overlapping section,This little-known project had a stimulating effect upon the young Hoesli,who,obviously fascinated by its spatial implications,returned again and again to it as a touchstone in his lectures and as a point of departure---thesubject of analysis by his students.The incidence of the L-shaped overlapping section was to
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