Stanislaus von Moos: Le Corbusier and Schellenursli

In the late summer of 1945, mere weeks after the end of World War II, a group of French intellectuals and artists was on its way for a short trip to Switzerland that also included the Engadine. Le Corbusier and the painter Jean Dubuffet ware part of the group. During their visit to Guarda, a small mountain village and celebrated showcase of recent Swiss Heimatschutz efforts, they got into quarrel with the man behind the restoration, the architect Jachen Könz.

While we can only speculate about the arguments exchanged in the altercation, we know that for both Le Corbusier and Dubuffet vernacular architecture and folk art were key concerns, especially in those troubled years. The incident as such has left no trace in history (except that Könz later claimed that the funnel-shaped windows of Le Corbusier's Ronchamp chapel were inspired by the houses seen in the Engadine). Instead, a children's book, entitled Schellenursli, and written by Selina Könz, Jachen Könz' wife, almost managed to make Guarda into a universal synonym of simple life in the remote mountain valley. This, at least, was Walt Disney's ambition, when, inspired by Schellenursli, he dispatched a film crew to Guarda so as to canonize that village idyll as the heart of Switzerland, and beyond that, even of Europe (1952). The movie was a miserable flop, but the recycling of folk culture either for high architecture or for mass tourism is still part of our cultural environment.

Stanislaus von Moos is an art historian and professor emeritus of Modern Art at the University of Zürich (1982–2005) and the founding editor of archithese (1971–1976). Apart from his Ph.D. dissertation (Turm und Bollwerk, 1976) and Le Corbusier: Elements of a Synthesis (1968), he has published on Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates (vol.1, 1987; vol.2, 1999), as well as on artists and architects like Karl Moser, Max Bill, Thomas Hirschhorn, Peter Fischli / David Weiss, among others. He has curated major exhibitions and held lecture- and professorships in Europe and overseas. His most recent books include Eyes That Saw: Architecture After Las Vegas (ed., together with Martino Stierli, 2020), Erste Hilfe: Architekturdiskurs nach 1940 (2021) as well as Twentyfive × Herzog & de Meuron (together with Arthur Rüegg, 2025). In 2023 he was awarded the Grand Prix Meret Oppenheim by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture.