Ark

History of the work

“Arche” (Ark), an iron sculpture by Pierre Siebold from 1968, is mounted on the façade of the Lindenhof hospital at Bremgartenstrasse 117. It arrived two years after the hospital's new building: in 1966 the new building went up next to the Gymnasium Neufeld, twice the size of the old house at Stadtbach.

The hospital's history goes back further. In 1899 a Red Cross school for nurses opened; in 1908 it took over and enlarged Dr. Lanz's private hospital at Stadtbach. Until 1994 the school was part of the hospital. Today the Lindenhof hospital belongs to the Lindenhof group, which also includes the Engeried and Sonnenhof hospitals.

Pierre Siebold, also called Peter, was born in Brussels on 28 March 1925 and held citizenship of Rohrbach in the canton of Bern. After the schools of applied arts in Bern and Zurich, he specialised as an art blacksmith at the art school in Geneva in 1945 and 1946. In 1947 he worked in Paris with Ossip Zadkine at the Grande Chaumière academy and that same year received the City of Bern's art prize. In 1956 he set up his workshop for metal sculpture in Versoix. He died in Geneva on 1 October 2012.

Siebold made sculptures in iron and bronze and mosaics for public space. According to the Geneva gallery Latham, he made the “Gardien de la paix” (Guardian of Peace) of 1958 on the façade of the Centre international in Geneva, twelve metres high and weighing 900 kilograms; the jeweller Gilbert Albert is said to have called him the “goldsmith of iron”. In Bern another of his works stands a few hundred metres away, the bronze “Trojan Horse” at the Hochfeld school. If you pass along Bremgartenstrasse, take a closer look at the hospital's façade.

Researched and summarised by Bärn Kit. Sources: Kultur Stadt Bern, Kunst im öffentlichen Raum (offene Daten) · Wikipedia (de): Peter Siebold (Künstler) · SIKART: Pierre Siebold (Kurzeintrag) · Galerie Latham (anticstore): Pierre Siebold (1925-2012) · Wikipedia (de): Lindenhofspital · Wikimedia Commons: Eisenplastik Arche (Pierre (Peter) Siebold 1968)