ISUP papers

During the last third of the nineteenth century a vast landfill operation extended Zurich’s territory. A system of waterfront parks established a new physical and visual relationship between Lake Zurich and the introverted town which had historically been built along two river banks. Images reveal how, over a mere decade, a new lakefront was manufactured and subsequently lined by lavish real estate. This civic project was jointly pursued by three independent communities, and inspired a rethinking of strategic urban planning on a unified municipal scale. One of these communities, Enge, was a key beneficiary of the public works begun in the 1880s, which turned the suburb into a cornerstone of a system of landfill parks. Reconceived on a cosmopolitan scale, Enge was destined for urban densification and extensive greening, while Zurich changed its orientation to the lake, and developed rail connections to national and international territories. As this essay will demonstrate, this change in the scale of references influenced the modernisation of Enge. On its sanitised waterfront, varying degrees of intentionality and visibility came to overlap. Infrastructural, financial and scenographic considerations interacted at a time when the public sector was not yet fully formalised, while urban and landscape planning were still evolving disciplines.

Cadastral map of Enge (c 1880, ink and watercolour).

On the eve of Arnold Bürkli’s lakefront transformations, the 1880 drawing shows the planned landscaping and rearrangement of building blocks and transportation infrastructure of what is still a suburb. The shoreline appears as a line between the existing Enge neighbourhood and the landfill parcels. These future lots (in light red) indicate the real estate potential identified along the parkside arteries. Dotted lines reveal the hypothetical scenarios under consideration – a park island, a public swimming facility, a harbour – all indicative of the taming of Lake Zurich. The proposed Enge harbour (far left) provides another indication of the waterfront’s future as a recreational landscape. It lacks the typical connection to manufacturing or warehousing facilities, as transportation along Lake Zurich would be increasingly handled by rail. In service since 1875, the Enge railroad station was to be relocated to a more privileged location, as already suggested in this 1881 drawing. Centred on a planned square facing the Arboretum and equipped with a formal gateway to the lakeside park system, the future station is the capstone of Bürkli’s transformations. After the First World War, however, Enge station was moved to its final and present location as the entire railway line was relocated underground, opening up an entire avenue for elegant redevelopment. © Planverwaltung Amt für Verkehr / Volkswirtschaftsdirektion Kanton Zurich

Agendas and Territories of Expansion

Participating in the social, economic and spatial hierarchies of late nineteenth-century Zurich, Enge was destined to become a prestigious neighbourhood. The new lakefront was ideally suited to express the power and status of the enterprising bourgeoisie. However, the discovery of this urban frontier owes something to an accidental dynamic. As an existing suburb, Enge was wedged between hills, lacking a significant relationship to the marshy lakefront – its name derives from the German eng (narrow) and describes its condition before landfill and drainage made it more desirable.

Zurich, a walled city until the 1830s, had historically, monopolised commerce through its own harbour on the river Limmat. Outside the city limits, Enge had become the location for numerous patrician summer homes, a select few entertaining a privileged relationship with Lake Zurich. However, there was no incentive for a comprehensive park system, nor for densification along the lake. In the absence of zoning regulations, the Canton granted the right of way for a lakefront railway in 1871. The project was to link Enge with the opposite lakeshore in Riesbach, feeding a new suburban line to Rapperswil. But in 1873, public protests against the loop of steel and steam galvanised support for a waterfront park and a vision of the lakefront as a valuable asset and a civic feature. After the railroad to Rapperswil was re-routed through a tunnel, a committee representing the three threatened communities was established.

This gradual approach to the realisation of a visionary idea illustrates a very different political process than, for instance, the reinvention of Paris pursued by Napoleon III. The same can be said for the ensuing transformation of Enge into a sought-after residential and office neighbourhood. Again, the necessary construction land superseded the existing patrician mansions. The process continued until the mid-twentieth century, evolving in parallel with the creation of parks on reclaimed waterfront land. The change in scale was facilitated by a new circulation system – a sequence of boulevards that was developed after the lakefront railway project was abandoned. This new system bypassed the historic city centre and the bridges over the Limmat, spanning the lakefront with a grand crossing at the river’s mouth, Quaibrücke. Inaugurated in 1880, the vast bridge shifted traffic from the core outwards, and introduced a new spatial hierarchy.

Quaibrücke was effectively the capstone for a system of parks that extended outwards on either side of the lake. Its most lavishly landscaped segments were in Enge, on land reclaimed from the lake – with landfill stemming from the excavation of a nearby hill and from a railroad tunnel under construction. The man who oversaw this comprehensive civil engineering project, first as City Engineer, then independently, was Arnold Bürkli (1833–1894).

Drainage and park furnishing of Arboretum (c 1885, ink and watercolour).

The drawing shows the distribution of two systems of cast-iron components in the Enge Arboretum: drainage pipes and standardised seating areas. The prefabricated benches lining the park’s sinuous walkways offer expansive views toward the lake. Regularly spaced, the seating arrangement indicates the disciplined public use intended for the new civic realm. Visitors are invited to enjoy the view in small groups (only from the 1980s on was a more informal use of the park tolerated, with access to the lawns and to water outside designated as swimming pools). This socialising is meant to be undistracted by consumption, particularly of alcohol, which explains the absence of snack bars and cafes in the plan of the 1885. The most salient geometric feature of the artificial landscape is the fern-like pattern in the central lawn, a drainage system linked to the main sewage channel at Alpenquai. An element of the overall regulatory infrastructure to which the lakefront belongs, the system of cast-iron pipes is also indicative of the tenuous condition of the water table. As Bürkli’s parks were inaugurated in 1887, recent landfill in Zug experienced a catastrophic failure when part of the lakefront promenade and 35 adjacent buildings collapsed into Lake Zug, causing 11 fatalities. Such incidents, as well as speculative real estate itself, have structural ties to the insurance sector, whose headquarters would be built adjacent to the Arboretum, along Mythenquai. In turn, the insurance companies themselves would evolve into some of the largest real estate developers in Zurich. © Planverwaltung Amt für Verkehr / Volkswirtschaftsdirektion Kanton Zurich

Typically, as other nineteenth-century urban planners whose work combined sanitation and beautification, Bürkli had initially faced the challenge of providing Zurich with an adequate sewage system, as well as connecting the new railroad station with the historic centre. Both tasks were a result of processes that had started in the first half of the nineteenth century – coming to terms with the demolition of fortifications and the arrival of the first Swiss railway line in 1847. His project for the city’s representative lakefront can be considered first and foremost as infrastructural and technocratic. It is also indicative of the decline of water transport, while reframing Lake Zurich as a recreational and tourist destination.

Completed in 1887, the waterfront redevelopment brought together the three independent communities of Zurich, Enge and Riesbach, an immediate precursor of municipal unification in 1893. As the evolution of Enge shows, Bürkli’s project was a catalyst for those economic interests that had begun to seek opportunities for property development beyond the historic city limits. By default, this agenda shifted the overall perception of Zurich – reorienting the city outwards. No longer focused on the Limmat river, the historical axis of transportation, Zurich embarked on a visual relationship with the space of the lake and the distant Alps. In Enge, this shift occurred along two new arteries, Mythenquai and Alpenquai, named after the mountain vistas, now framed as part of the urban experience.

The new paradigm becomes clear by comparing the urban iconography before and after the public works conducted under Bürkli. A map from 1867 shows the recently de-fortified city still surrounded by loose settlements. In this almost agrarian context, the railway station is inserted in an ambivalent manner. In a painting from the 1860s, the faraway city on the lake is foregrounded by a bucolic setting occupied by the mansions of Enge, still indicating the area’s status as an affluent suburb. Nestled between trees, facing the lake on the right is Villa Belvoir, home to Alfred Escher (1819–1882). In contrast with the scale and Biedermeier atmosphere of Enge, the family residence heralds a new scale of urban development. A distant cousin of Arnold Bürkli and member of the same elite, Escher was a towering figure in Zurich politics and the Swiss economy from 1848 – the inception of the Swiss federal state – onwards. Both local and national territories intersected in his career. The founder of the recently failed Credit Suisse and the insurance company now known as Swisslife among other ventures, Escher was also the driving force behind the expansion of the Swiss railway system, and most notably, the Gotthard tunnel. His career is tied to Zurich’s development into the country’s economic heart in terms of transport, insurance, finance and manufacturing. These sectors, all steeped in a culture of speculation and risk, led to the extreme concentrations of capital, workers and consumers that produced Zurich’s dense urban environments in the late nineteenth century.

Shoreline and landscaping at Arboretum (c 1890, photography)

The unfolding of a novel iconography of the public realm on Bürkli’s landfill coincides with the growing popularity of urban photography. Taken shortly after the public works in Enge were completed, this image conveys the artificiality of the landscaping by Otto Froebel. Freshly planted trees are cropped and will provide visitors with shade someday. A miniature wilderness separates landfill and water: gravel and large boulders are strewn along the fabricated shoreline. Contained behind the mineral collage is rubble from the railroad tunnels being drilled on the other side of Lake Zurich, as well as from a recently cleared medieval neighbourhood at the tip of the lake. The extreme density of the burgeoning city is absent from this almost romantic representation of urban landscape. Development has yet to begin along Alpenquai: building lots along the boulevard remain empty and Tonhalle, Zurich’s new philharmonic hall, has yet to be erected, allowing the historic church spires to dominate the panorama. They are evidence of the traditional distance to the lake, of a relationship about to be overcome, as the city embraces its waterfront. This new scale will be fully established by 1893, when municipal reform incorporates the adjacent suburbs.

A Perspective from 1881

Escher did not live to see the impact of his initiatives on the urban landscape. However, he probably did see the 1881 bird’s-eye view representing Bürkli’s civic project for the lakefront. As a significant public commission, the undertaking had to be approved by public vote, and required the support of the citizens of Enge, Riesbach and Zurich. In the image from 1881, a decade prior to municipal unification, Zurich is already represented as a coherent whole, albeit with different densities.

What does the aerial view predict for the Enge neighbourhood? Whereas a homogenous fabric is envisaged for Riesbach and ‘downtown’ Zurich, the Enge lakefront is subjected to romantic landscaping. Five very large building plots are designated for villas, as signposted by Ferdinand Stadler’s Villa Rosau, already completed in 1844. Reclaimed land would extend these privileged parcels, owned by old Zurich families, with a public park that directly borders the water. Work on the Arboretum, designed by Otto Froebel and Evariste Mertens, began in 1886 and became a scenic highlight of the unfolding park system. Rare tree species and organic pathways offer the flâneur an escapist territory, physically detached from the city and endowed with an Alpine view. A landscaped artificial island was proposed adjacent to the park, connected to Alpenquai by a pedestrian bridge. As a picturesque artificial space, the island stands in stark contrast with the rational circulation on the other side of Alpenquai. Nestled against the shoreline, the island creates a symbiotic relationship with it, further emphasised by the fact that both are created with reclaimed land and were, at that stage, merely hypothetical.

The 1881 bird’s-eye view showed voters a new metropolitan density based on an abstract modelling of hypothetical elements which remained unbuilt: the island and two building blocks which appear to the right of Quaibrücke, on the location of the public plaza known today as Sechseläutenplatz. The aerial view can be interpreted as an implicit masterplan, where broad thoroughfares delineate large blocks of uniform heights. Its iconography is typical of the circulatory rationale underlying the transformation of European cities to accommodate traffic and real estate alike. In this context, the commodification and financialisation of urban ground, transform the temporal logic of building cycles.

On the other hand, this brings about a redefinition of public space. An accelerated spatial dynamic is already apparent in the manipulation of the perspective: arteries radiate outwards to the lakefront, thus representing Zurich’s future as an urban core thrust open. However, these streets do not follow straight lines, nor does the Limmat have the geometry of a grand boulevard thrust through the medieval core. Instead, the aerial perspective shows an idealised web of connections in a dilated urban fabric, its elasticity reminiscent of the commercial representations of Haussmann’s Paris from the 1850s and 1860s.

The visionary civic dimension of Bürkli’s project is inseparable from the potential it generated for real estate. Zurich’s lakefront was engineered to attract capital. Following the public-private model that had recently been adopted for development along Vienna’s Ringstrasse, the owners of the lakefront properties who would benefit from land reclamation would co-fund the public works. Contemporary Vienna proves to be the more pertinent reference point than the remodelling of Paris under Napoleon III.

Palais Henneberg and Rotes Schloss (c 1900, photography by Adolf Moser)

Extremely broad, yet still unpaved in this turn-of-the-century view, Alpenquai is lined by two pioneering ventures. Each dominating a block created by landfill, they represent the competing scales of urban villa and apartment block. Prestigious residences like these were either realised by private individuals, such as silk manufacturer and art collector Karl Gustav Henneberg with architect Emil Schmid-Kerez, or by real estate consortia with architect-developers such as Heinrich Ernst, who was responsible for the palatial structure in the background, Rotes Schloss. Equipped with its own glass-domed winter garden, Palais Henneberg was an anachronism in comparison to contemporary large-scale constructions such as Rotes Schloss. Here the architect deployed a picturesque composition to suppress the repetitive inner logic of rental apartments. With roof massing inspired by the Loire castles, Rotes Schloss celebrates its uniqueness on the new boulevard. Similar to Henry Hardenbergh’s 1884 palatial Dakota Building, the first apartment block to be built along Manhattan’s Central Park, Rotes Schloss became the most iconic building on the Enge lakefront. Nevertheless, it was a product of speculation – a perimeter block maximising density like the contemporary tenements in Zurich’s working-class neighbourhoods.

The Commodification of a Void

Bürkli’s strategy of commodifying a void is reminiscent of the Ringstrasse, where planners had seized the opportunity provided by former military grounds surrounding the medieval core. The transformations in Vienna and Zurich were driven by the similar economic, infrastructural and spatial logics although framed by diametrically opposed political contexts. In either case, spaces beyond the historical centre were colonised as spaces of spectacle, a new public realm enhanced by a particular panorama.

Vienna’s Ringstrasse unfolds as a sequence of spaces equipped with lavish greenery and public institutions, whereas Zurich’s system is organised as a waterfront semi-circle. Distant landscape views are harnessed, becoming part of an urban landscape with the historic core as its apex. Although public spaces and arts venues are distributed throughout the former void in both cities, most of the land was sold to private landowners or developers. Their contributions financed radical urban transformations both in Zurich and Vienna. And from the 1880s on, it was in Enge that palatial mansions started appearing, modelled on the residences built along the Ringstrasse during the same decade.

The evolution of Enge from patrician suburb to dense metropolitan neighbourhood was completed by the turn of the last century. Around 1900, the boulevards lining Enge’s waterfront parks were animated by new residences, cultural institutions and businesses. Part of this constellation of buildings are the Tonhalle philharmonic hall with its exuberant beaux-arts composition, and the monumental headquarters of three insurance companies. The most significant are the neo-baroque headquarters of Swiss Re, completed before the onset of the First World War. The insurance company, originally backed by Enge resident Alfred Escher, built its headquarters in the vicinity of Villa Belvoir, the entrepreneur’s home, close to the railway line that he controlled.

Risk management businesses, such as insurers, were eager to establish a presence in this distinguished part of Zurich. Corporations built their headquarters on reclaimed ground created with rubble from urban renewal projects and railway tunnel construction, ( and ) Escher, a railroad pioneer, had been involved in enterprises on a much larger scale, such as the Gotthard railway, which he initiated and directed as of 1871. The ambitious European undertaking to link Italy and Germany via Switzerland cannot be separated from the ongoing speculation in Zurich, the city through which it would pass. Its role as European transportation hub was set, simultaneously increasing its significance as a banking centre, particularly the evolving financial sector which Escher was also enmeshed in, thus playing an instrumental role for railway financing. He proved to be fundamental in establishing a new territorial logic that came to define the young republic. To Escher’s advantage, state intervention on the national scale was still underdeveloped, whereas on the municipal level urban and landscape design remained budding disciplines.

The agendas of controversial entrepreneurs such as Escher can be understood within the novel circulatory systems typical of nineteenth-century capitalism. Similar to the financial institutions backing railroad construction, the real estate development of this era followed its own speculative dynamic. It is no coincidence that the lakeside land reclamation in Enge and the construction of the Gotthard tunnel occurred at the same time. Setting an urban frame for the alpine panorama, the system of parks ushered in a space of consumption. Bürkli set up this visual relationship at a time when travel to and through the Alps was about to be radically accelerated. This created the need for representative spaces in the rapidly modernising urban centres.

While promoting and financing the Gotthard railway together with foreign powers, Zurich consolidated financial networks and a novel service sector. This economic shift was reflected in the growing scale of urban speculation. In parallel with lakefront urbanisation, the opposite side of the city was dramatically reshaped to house the growing workforce of the manufacturing districts in tenement neighbourhoods. By the twentieth century, the insurance companies with headquarters in Enge had become heavily involved in real estate, investing their assets throughout the city and beyond.

Interior at Weisses Schloss (1899, photography by Johannes Meiner)

Vast apartment buildings such as Weisses Schloss and adjacent Rotes Schloss were engineered to capture views for their residents with significant fenestration and verandas. Yet this 1899 image by Johannes Meiner does not reveal the lake panorama, nor the distant Alps. Almost as if daylight were an intrusion, the photograph is extremely backlit. Emphasising sheltered interiority, it presents a vision of nineteenth-century domesticity. Combined with layers of wallpaper, curtains, draperies and rugs, ornate, upholstered furniture lends a cavernous quality to the bourgeois parlour. Nevertheless, such apartments were vast in size and equipped with modern amenities, attracting an affluent class unfamiliar with apartment living. With its radical architectural scale and low occupancy rate, Enge’s ‘Schloss’ typology shielded the lakefront parks from the tenement districts growing beyond. Therefore, Rotes and Weisses Schloss took on a distinct role in spatial and socioeconomic ordering as the city grew in complexity and density.

Twentieth-century Postscript

The Second World War reframed the entanglement of territory, infrastructure, mobility and risk for Switzerland – and, poignantly, also for Enge. Inevitably, the country’s geographical position between Germany and Italy became a strategic asset. Blessed with intact infrastructure, and with Zurich arms manufacturer Emil Bührle directly supplying Nazi Germany, Switzerland was not so much a neutral country, but rather a hostage to the axis powers. As its infrastructure proved crucial for the circulation of physical goods and capital prior to Hitler’s attack on France in May 1940, an attack from the north appeared imminent. The Swiss military, anticipating a German occupation, devised a defence line passing through the heart of Zurich and along the lake, through Enge. A series of camouflaged bunkers was built from Quaibrücke all along the waterfront in the autumn of 1939, whereas the bridge itself, rebuilt for the National Exhibition of 1939, was equipped with an integrated bunker. Covertly, the defence system was built in the first few months of the Second World War, while Bürkli’s lakefront parks hosted the National Exhibition, with the Kongresshaus, the new convention centre, as its culmination point in Enge.

Zurich’s military infrastructure was neither finished nor put to use, after the planned defence line shifted further inland in 1940. In the event of an occupation of urban Switzerland, the new scenario would have entailed a relocation of the army and government to the Gotthard area. The anticipated withdrawal to the Alpine fortress known as the Réduit is further proof of the speculative and fabricated nature of the Swiss territory: sacrificing urbanised Switzerland to the enemy reinforces the anti-urban narrative implicit in the identity politics that led to the Second World War, as featured at the National Exhibition in Zurich.

Under acute threat, the Alps are reconceptualised as a barrier: colonised in the nineteenth century, the Gotthard railway now symbolised Switzerland’s defence. During the entire war, however, the north-south route was used by the axis powers for the transportation of strategic resources. Germany and Italy upheld a contractual right to rail transit enshrined in the Gotthard Treaty of 1909. Literally undermined, the Alpine ‘fortress’ became something of a paradox. Like the opportunism of its banking system, Switzerland’s vaunted neutrality belied the collaboration of its transport infrastructure. These complex relationships are registered by the artificial urban landscape of Zurich Enge. The prestigious Alpenquai boulevard was renamed after General Henri Guisan in 1960, a tribute to the army general who had designated Lake Zurich a frontline in the Second World War, despite opposition from Zurich’s mayor.

The myth of a country defended not in its cities, but from the remote Alpine Réduit is also rooted in a relationship established in the previous century. Focused on Zurich as Switzerland’s financial powerhouse, this co-dependency emerged with the new nation state when transport networks reorganised urban and rural territories. At once material and immaterial, these networks produced spaces where the industrialisation, speculation and risk intersected. The consequences remain readable in the fabricated ground and monumental metamorphosis of Enge.

Night view of Tonhalle from Alpenquai (1932, photography by Gottfried Gloor)

Photographer Gottfried Gloor captured the spectre of an electrically lit Tonhalle during a fireworks display. His image celebrates the festive architecture of Zurich’s philharmonic hall, the centrepiece of Alpenquai. Similar to the iconic roofscape of its immediate neighbour, the Rotes Schloss, the silhouette projects its elaborate composition toward those arriving by boat from Lake Zurich. Completed in 1894 following Enge’s incorporation into Zurich, the Tonhalle was the harbinger of an urban landscape defined by leisure and consumption – as was the opera on the opposite lakeshore, designed by the same Viennese theatre architects Helmer & Fellner. The Tonhalle was often referred to as the Trocadéro, in reference to the prominent festival hall in Paris, also housed within a dome and flanked by twin towers. In this image from 1932, Zurich’s Trocadéro appears as if on fire, its beaux-arts architecture dematerialised by nocturnal illumination. Just like its Parisian counterpart, the bulk of the Tonhalle appears somewhat dated at this point, and would soon be demolished and replaced by a more sedate civic composition, also linked to a large-scale exhibition. While the Trocadéro would become the Palais de Chaillot, the centrepiece of the 1937 Exposition Universelle, Zurich’s Kongresshaus would be completed in time for the 1939 Landesausstellung. Before the closing of the Swiss national exhibition, the Second World War had begun. Zurich’s centre was designated as a defense line against the anticipated attack from the north, and Bürkli’s lakefront park system was equipped with a network of concealed bunkers.