Rudolf Olgiati’s Swiss Objectivity

Rudolf Olgiati was a Swiss architect born in 1910 at Chur. After studying art history and working as an architect in Zürich, Oligati moved to Flims in 1944 continuing his architecture practice while renovating his own home, a house he had purchased in 1930.  Rudolf’s son, the highly accomplished architect, Valerio Oligati, still lives there today.

Rudolf Olgiati was a representative of the New Objectivity, an architectural movement born in Germany in the 20s with the idea of building as much cost-effective housing as possible. He was one of the first architects in the mid-1950s to discover the importance and effectiveness of historical design principles for the architecture of modernity.

While Olgiati’s work largely featured single family homes and apartment houses, bringing a modernist aesthetic to the tradition of the mountainous Grisons of eastern Switzerland, he also designed a movie theater, a restaurant, a flower shop, and a few buildings in southern France and Germany with Alfred Werner Maurer. He also restored old farmhouses, resulting in a large collection of antique furniture, articles of daily use, and parts of buildings he kept until his death in September 1995.

Throughout his career, the architect developed a personal language that successfully combined a modernist approach mainly oriented towards Le Corbusier (particularly for the abstract volumes) with the use of traditional references from his region’s vernacular style and with the study of proportions in ancient Greek architecture. Olgiati's cubical use of forms was striving for a universal, timeless, and radically modern architecture, bringing the universality of structure and modern construction to a united aesthetic.

The houses he built reveal a carefully composed floor plan which is intended to enhance specific views and generate unexpected interior spaces. Large windows on a corner, small openings in a thick wall, segmental arches on the ground floor, sequences of columns to mark the entry are adapted to each spatial situation and pierce or complete the plastic white mass constituting the basic volumes of each Olgiati building.