07.18.2025-10.26.2025
And yet everything had begun so well
LIVING IN SWITZERLAND IN THE 1930S
In 1948, Sigfried Giedion, a historian of modern art and architecture, drew a bitter conclusion: the modernist utopia, driven by the hope of a better world thanks to mechanization, had gone off the rails. What was supposed to be an engine of progress in the architecture of the 1930s has become a tool of destruction, leading to a global cataclysm. Close to major figures such as Le Corbusier, Jean Arp, László Moholy-Nagy and Max Ernst, Giedion embodied the link between the actors of modernity in Switzerland between the wars, and strengthened their ties with the world's major capitals.
And yet it all began so well explores the contrasting visions of this modernity and offers a physical and spatial experience of it through various historical examples from Geneva and Zurich, including the Clarté building. The exhibition reveals a clash of cultures and highlights the ambiguity of this era, oscillating between ideal and reality, by confronting different approaches to the art of living.
Arthur Rüegg is the curator of the exhibition And yet it all began so well. Architect, architectural historian and professor emeritus at ETH Zurich, where he taught from 1991 to 2007, he is internationally recognized as a specialist in modernism. He has devoted himself to the in-depth study of Le Corbusier's work, to which he has dedicated several major publications. He has also contributed to several restorations of emblematic modernist buildings, combining scientific rigor with an eye for detail, notably in the reconstitution of interiors according to original materials and colors.
With the support of the City of Geneva's Unité du Patrimoine Architectural (CPA) and the participation of the Cinémathèque Suisse.