Lisbeth Sachs (1914-2002) caused a sensation at the very beginning of her professional career: as a fresh graduate, she won the 1939 competition for the Kurtheater Baden.

Through the building, opened in 1952, she expressed her architectural positioning and experienced what it meant to be one of the first independent Swiss female architects in a male-dominated profession. Construction was, for Sachs, a procedural act that reached from craftsmanship to the suitability of materials and the appropriation of space by people. She sought a floating architecture that emerged organically from the topography and followed environmentally and socially compatible principles.

Lisbeth Sachs’s interdisciplinary understanding of architecture as applied ecology is more relevant now than ever. Rahel Hartmann Schweizer’s book is the first to bring this critical representative of a post-war architecture, positioned between tradition and utopia, to centre stage.

Lisbeth Sachs (1914-2002) caused a sensation at the very beginning of her professional career: as a fresh graduate, she won the 1939 competition for the Kurtheater Baden.

Through the building, opened in 1952, she expressed her architectural positioning and experienced what it meant to be one of the first independent Swiss female architects in a male-dominated profession. Construction was, for Sachs, a procedural act that reached from craftsmanship to the suitability of materials and the appropriation of space by people. She sought a floating architecture that emerged organically from the topography and followed environmentally and socially compatible principles.

Lisbeth Sachs’s interdisciplinary understanding of architecture as applied ecology is more relevant now than ever. Rahel Hartmann Schweizer’s book is the first to bring this critical representative of a post-war architecture, positioned between tradition and utopia, to centre stage.