Six decades of measured drawings, working models and unbuilt civic proposals from the studio of Halde Aregger (1934—2014), presented in full for the first time outside Lucerne.
Aregger built slowly. In a discipline that, by the closing decades of the twentieth century, had begun to prize spectacle and silhouette, he kept faith with mass, with the local quarry, with the assumption that a public building should outlast the politics that commissioned it. This catalogue is the first sustained attempt to read his practice as a single project.
Halde Aregger arrived at the office of Otto Glaus in the autumn of 1952, an apprentice carpenter from Wolhusen with no formal training in drawing and a borrowed parallel rule. The office was then completing the bath-house at Lido di Lugano, and Aregger's first paid task — recorded in a Glaus office ledger preserved in the present exhibition — was to letter the door schedules. He stayed nine years.
What Glaus taught him was not, in any obvious sense, a style. Aregger's later work shares almost nothing with Glaus's exuberant lakeside modernism. What he absorbed was something more durable: an attitude toward the working drawing as a binding contract with the trades, and a corresponding suspicion of any line that could not be built. It is an attitude one finds, decades later, in the Glarus tribunal — every reveal dimensioned, every junction resolved on the half-size detail.
The early competition entries, gathered in Room 01, already show this discipline. The 1958 submission for the cantonal hospital at Stans — fourth prize — proposes a building of conspicuous restraint: three parallel bars on a sloping site, the corridor a continuous south-facing loggia, the structural grid set out in a hand that is already unmistakeable.
In 1969, with the small Emmenbrücke schoolhouse, Aregger began to work in board-marked concrete. The decision was, by his own later account, both economic and ethical. The cantons of central Switzerland were building, in those years, with a sudden civic ambition; the budgets were modest; the timber was local; and concrete cast against rough Tannenholz formwork produced a surface that Aregger believed — rightly — would weather honestly.
The Aarau swimming hall (1974—1976) is the masterwork of this period and remains, despite a contested 2018 refurbishment, the building by which his practice is best known abroad. Its long, top-lit volume rests on a concrete table whose underside is articulated with a coffered grid set out at 1.20 m centres — the same module that organises the changing rooms below and the parking deck beneath them.1 The whole building is a single act of dimensional economy.
It is in this decade that one first sees the procedural habit that would mark the remainder of his career: every project began with a square of tracing paper, ruled with the proposed structural module, on which the brief was rewritten in his own hand. The exhibition reproduces nine of these sheets, including the one for the Aarau hall.
The civic plan for Bellinzona, on which Aregger worked between 2009 and his death in 2014, was never built. The proposal — to relocate the cantonal courts to a new precinct beside the Castelgrande — was rejected in a 2015 referendum by a margin of 2,114 votes.2 The drawings, modelled in this exhibition for the first time at 1:200, deserve to be read on their own terms.
What Aregger proposed was not a single building but a measured re-stitching of an existing fabric: three new volumes of cast-in-place concrete, each set behind the line of an existing nineteenth-century arcade, each addressing a different square. The plan is, in the precise sense of the word, conservative — it asks the new building to do less than the old, and to do it more quietly.
The model in Room 07 was fabricated, after the architect's death, by his former assistant Lorenz Stoll, working from the original 1:50 plans. Aregger had marked the cardboard mock-up he kept in the studio with a single note in pencil: “keine Geste — nur das Maß.”3
Architecture is not the art of the new. It is the art of the dimension that survives the budget that paid for it.— Halde Aregger, lecture at ETH Zürich, 04 November 1991
The original of this drawing, executed in graphite and red china on yellow tracing paper, measures 1.20 × 0.84 m and bears the studio's wet stamp dated 11.02.1974. Two adjacent sheets in the archive show the soffit module being adjusted from 1.10 m to the final 1.20 m to align with the parking deck columns below.
| Date | Time | Event | Speaker / Lead | Room | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 07.05 | 18:30 | Opening lecture “A measured practice: re-reading Aregger after 2014” | Margrit Hülsmeier (ETH) | Aula | ● Live |
| 14.05 | 19:00 | In conversation Quintus Miller & Ruedi Bonderer on the Glarus tribunal | Miller / Bonderer | R.05 | Ticketed |
| 22.05 | 14:00 | Site walk: Aarau swimming hall Coach departs Zürich HB Sihlquai 13:15 — return 18:30 | Atelier Stoll, Basel | Off-site | Waitlist |
| 13.06 | 09:30 | Symposium — “Mass and Civic Life” Eight papers, one round-table; full programme overleaf | Convened: P. Lang | Aula | ● Live |
| 20.06 | 20:00 | Film screening Aregger bei der Arbeit (P. Mettler, 1991, 73 min) | Intro: P. Mettler | Cinema | CHF 12 |
| 04.07 | 11:00 | Curator's tour (DE) Reduced numbers, hour and a half, drawings room | A. Vögtlin | R.01—R.04 | Free |
| 11.07 | 11:00 | Curator's tour (EN) Reduced numbers, hour and a half, drawings room | A. Vögtlin | R.01—R.04 | Free |
| 25.07 | 19:30 | Late opening — concert Heinz Holliger conducts an arrangement of the 1976 Aarau notebooks | Collegium Novum | R.03 | Ticketed |
Publication This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition Cartographies of Concrete: Halde Aregger 1962—2014, presented at Kunsthaus Zürich from 30 April to 27 September 2026.
Editor Margrit Hülsmeier, with Andrea Vögtlin and Peter Lang. Catalogue design by Studio Brunner / Hofer, Basel. Typeset in Inter, Newsreader and JetBrains Mono.
Printing Printed in an edition of 3,200 by Druckerei Odermatt AG, Dallenwil, on Munken Pure 120 gsm. Bound in linen, two-colour offset. ISBN 978-3-907894-12-7.
Rights © 2026 Kunsthaus Zürich and the authors. All works © Estate of Halde Aregger. No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior written permission.