Lisbeth Sachs - Animate Architecture

Lisbeth Sachs (1914–2002) made a remarkable debut: freshly graduated, she won the 1939 competition for the Kurtheater Baden. With the building, inaugurated in 1952, she asserted a lucid architectural stance while facing the challenges of being one of Switzerland’s first independent female architects in a male-dominated field. For Sachs, construction was a process linking craftsmanship, material adequacy, and the users’ appropriation of space. She aspired to an architecture that seemed to float, emerging from the site itself and guided by environmental and social responsibility. Her interdisciplinary vision, understood as applied ecology, makes her work and thought strikingly relevant today. Rahel Hartmann Schweizer’s book on this unconventional architect, researcher, and critic is part of Switzerland’s contribution to the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, where Annexe revives Sachs’s temporary art gallery for the 1958 Saffa exhibition.

ISBN: 978-3-85676-493-7