Walther Joss’s house at Habsburgstrasse 12

About the building

At Habsburgstrasse 12 a house crouches under a huge hipped roof that sweeps out at the bottom and has only a short ridge. It was built in 1904 to designs by the Bern architect Walther Joss; according to the City of Bern building inventory, the client was the merchant E. Schätti. The house is rated worthy of protection and belongs to the Kirchenfeld building group.

Joss (1875–1915) had worked around 1900 in the Karlsruhe office of Curjel & Moser and, as a member of that office, worked on Bern’s Pauluskirche. In 1908 he was one of the founders of the Federation of Swiss Architects, and from 1907 he ran a joint office with Hans Klauser. The Schweizerische Bauzeitung presented the house on Habsburgstrasse in 1906 with views and plans.

According to that report, the client set the unusual brief: all living rooms and some of the bedrooms were to be on a single floor. So the house has only a raised ground floor and a converted attic, linked by a hall containing the stair. The forms draw on rural building traditions, with modern touches. The roof was covered with slate because red tiles were not permitted in the Kirchenfeld at the time.

Towards the street, set off-centre, is an entrance hall with paired posts, and above it a terrace cuts deep into the roof. It is closed by a board-clad gable over three windows. On the south-west side there are narrow slit windows and a half-timbered gable, and to the north a rounded bay. The heritage office calls the house in many respects pioneeringly modern and classes it as National Romanticism. The plain, geometric fence is also part of the design.

Researched and summarised by Bärn Kit. Sources: Bauinventar der Stadt Bern: Habsburgstrasse 12 · Schweizerische Bauzeitung 47 (1906), Heft 8, S. 93–94: Wohnhaus an der Habsburgerstrasse in Bern · Wikipedia (de): Walter Joss · Wikidata: Q138809706 · Wikipedia (de): Liste der Kulturgüter in Bern/Kirchenfeld-Schosshalde (Nord)