Pragmatischer Städtebau 1927–1981 – Otto Senn

The housing settlement Wittigkofen near Bern became the epitome of the post 1975 «anti-urban reflex» in urban planning in Switzerland. Basel-based architect Otto Senn (1902-1993) had conceived of the satellite city since 1960, building on the modernist housing and urban planning discourse. In 1966, historian Paul Hofer described the settlement as, «one of the most interesting workplaces in town planning in our country». Merely ten years later, critics illustrated the «missed planning euphoria» of the 1960s using pictures of Wittigkofen’s «shapeless building mountains and concrete landscapes». Senn’s early residential buildings, on the other hand, are icons of modernity. From the beginning of his career – after completing his diploma with Karl Moser at the ETH Zurich in 1927 – he, similar to his classmate Alfred Roth, incorporated bourgeois ideas of living into his rational formal canon. With the block of flats Parkhaus Zossen in Basel (1933-1938) Senn realized a concept in urban planning that foreshadows the later settlement near Bern. In Parkhaus Zossen, he strengthened the relationship between the typical Basel perimeter block development and an adjacent park by building a «Wohnsackgasse» or a green cul-de-sac. Senn’s development of the Wohnsackgasse was only natural: as an urban planning student of Hans Bernoulli at the ETH, he was influenced by Bernoulli’s «favourite thought» – the cul-de-sac. Furthermore, he examined the concept first-hand during a 1932 trip to England, where he studied the Garden City Movement and the London City Council plans for the British metropolis. Whilst after 1945 Haefeli Moser Steiger designed differentiated buildings depending on issues of topography, Senn developed the spatial principle of the cul-de-sac into circularly enclosed areas of settlement with pentagonal residential towers in their center. In Wittigkofen, through the process of rationalization, the towers’ polygons gave way to staggered, rectangular structures. Although their expression ultimately contradicted ideas of contemporary urbanity, the settlement manifests an important stage in Swiss urban planning. As a result of the critical reception of this late large-scale project, Otto Senn is widely recognized as a designer of public buildings, namely as an expert in the theory of Protestant churches. It is, however, the issue of housing that he consistently combined with urbanistic questions – his notion of «Pragmatic Urbanism» – that determines Senn’s oeuvre and is therefore the focus of this dissertation. Through the analysis of Senn’s contribution to Switzerland’s architectural and urban history, the dissertation attempts to re-examine and to re-emphasize the impact of his residential projects.