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    Swiss Chalet Book: An Elegant Guide to Architecture and Design
    Swiss Chalet Book: An Elegant Guide to Architecture and Design
    Swiss Chalet Book: An Elegant Guide to Architecture and Design
    Ebook194 pages1 hour

    Swiss Chalet Book: An Elegant Guide to Architecture and Design

    By William S.B. Dana

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    About this ebook

    Here William S. B. Dana, B.S., presents an in-depth and precise depiction of the breathtaking architectural masterpieces known as the Swiss Chalets. The culmination of elaborate conversations with the designers, the builders, and the experts on these spectacular buildings, here is a piece of design history that is not to be missed.

    A style of German origin, Swiss Chalets were best known for their large windows, ornate carvings, and balconies. Often they were brightly painted, and had gabled roofs with great overhanging eaves. These stunning aristocratic homes decorated the Swiss countryside in the nineteenth century, and later could be seen throughout the rest of the world. New Chalets, as they were called, rose up in Norway and Sweden, and finally even crossed the Atlantic, appearing in places as unexpected as Ohio and New Jersey.

    Through delicate language and lines, Dana expresses both the science and the art behind the simple structural elements and the most complex details of the chalets. This book, a 1913 original, displays diagrams, architectural plans, and photographs to best convey the different fundamentals and models of Swiss Chalets. The author’s research of this beautiful art form cultivates knowledge and appreciation of this great architectural style.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSkyhorse
    Release dateNov 13, 2012
    ISBN9781510720480
    Swiss Chalet Book: An Elegant Guide to Architecture and Design

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      Book preview

      Swiss Chalet Book - William S.B. Dana

      INTRODUCTION

      STREAMS, not of lava, but of rich, life-giving soil, have been floating down for ages in the great riverways of the Danube, Seine, Rhine, Rhone, and Po—from the peak of Europe, to replenish the lands of France, Germany, The Netherlands, Austria, and Italy. This erosion of both glacier and river has torn apart this mighty peak on every flank; rending the countryside into chasm, valley, mountainside, and cliff to form the ramparts of the Alps—the citadel of Europe, which composes a large part of today’s Switzerland.

      Somewhere near the center of Asia were once erected the two pillars of the human race. From them issued forth great streams of humanity flowing to all parts of the earth; one of these arrived, at some remote time, in the region of the Alps and formed settlements at the most convenient and strategic points. In the time of the Romans, citadels were built along the northern frontier as places of defense against the hostile Germanic tribes—these were the beginnings of some of the cities of today, such as Berne and Solothurn on the Aare, and Basel on the Rhine.

      It is not in these citadels, however, that we must look for the presence of the châlet, or its prototype. The châlet is rather the product of the outlying districts, the home of the agricultural and cattle-raising classes.

      This particular stream of humanity that settled in modern Switzerland left behind (on its way from its starting place in Asia) a stream of habitations which, if it were in the power of human beings to discover and reveal, would set forth luminously the development from the ancient form of dwelling to the modern. In the Tyrolese Alps to the east of Switzerland, the dwellings are unmistakably of the same species as the Swiss châlet. An example of a Tyrolese châlet is given on page 3.

      Whether or not it would be possible to discover further to the east other links in the chain of châlet evolution, the fact remains that Viollet-le-Duc in l’Histoire de l’habitation humaine makes this observation: You will be surprised if I tell you that the châlets of the Swiss mountains are exactly the same as one sees on the slopes of the Himalayas and in the valleys of Kashmir.

      The illustration which accompanies the above quotation is reproduced on page 5. The method of insulating from the earth is that of stilts rather than that of waterproof shoes. The future consoles, brackets, balconies, balustrades, gables, and wall beams are here seen in their original simplicity.

      The primitive châlet was all inclusive; that is, it housed not only the human family or families, but also their most useful species of animals, together with their means of sustenance. A glance at the accompanying plans on page 3 will demonstrate this. A translation from Graffenried and Stürler’s Architecture Suisse (1844) gives a glimpse of native châlet-building on the cooperative, or community, plan: "… the native, when he decides to build … secures a suitable plot. In mountainous regions, as at Iseltwald, where cultivated land is rare, the cost is about 1½ cents per square foot. In less valuable locations, the cost is about a half-mill per square foot. For the wood for constructing his home, the builder, if he is poor, requests assistance from his local government. Each community owns its forests, and where these are not available, those of the state can be drawn upon for the purpose.

      The timber having been selected, the friends and neighbors assist the home-maker in his work, the understanding being that he shall return the favor later by an equivalent service. The work is ordinarily done in winter when the farmer is free from the duties of the field and flock.

      The early châlets were veritable fortresses in wood, their walls consisting of barricades of tree trunks in tiers, one trunk on top of the other, and notched firmly together at the corners, after the fashion of the log-cabins so familiar in America. The foes were by no means all human, as is evidenced in the case of stolid châlets built on the heights at the rear of which a sufficient number of trees have been left standing to form an additional protection against avalanches. Their roofs, which were allowed to make vast projections in many cases, were protected against the lifting power of mountain gales by heavy, rough stones placed in rows on top of them. In the twentieth century, these same constructive motives persist, but their bulk is greatly reduced, the walls being about half their former thickness, and huge projecting consoles having become diagonal braces.

      If we allow ourselves for a moment to behold in imagination a spectacle of the thousands of present-day Swiss châlets, dismembered and gathered together to form a great mountain of châlet parts, we would find little difficulty in reassembling them (still in imagination) into a few great groups. We would find a host of long red pine beams, rectangular in cross-section, ranging from the proportion of three to four in the oldest châlets to one to three in the châlets of today, with their ends notched as shown in chapter two and both edges grooved and gouged; and a correspondingly large number of long narrow strips, just large enough to fit into the grooves of the beams. These two groups represent the walls of the châlets of the country. A great heap of round pegs, 1 inch by 4 or 5 inches long, would represent the means by which any two wall beams, when placed in position and splined, would be held tightly together. (Notice the similarity between this wall construction, and our own mill-floor construction.) A small mountain of beams thicker in section than the wall beams, but less than a tenth in number, grooved on one side, would represent the girts or wall beams at the floor levels, grooved on the inside face to receive the ends or edges of

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