Benjamin Recordon

Benjamin Recordon: Third Prize, First Building

In 1877 the city of Lausanne held a competition for a Palais de Justice on the Montbenon terrace above the lake. A thirty-two-year-old architect from Vevey came third. The jury's verdict turned out not to matter: it was his design that was built, and he supervised the work himself until the building was finished in 1886. Benjamin Recordon's career has that shape throughout — rarely first in the placings, consistently the man whose drawings ended up as stone, and eventually the professor who taught the engineers who would remake Swiss building altogether.

A Pastor's Son in Vevey

Recordon was born on 2 September 1845 in Vevey, on the Lake Geneva shore. His father, Charles François Gabriel Recordon, was a pastor; his mother was Louise Catherine Walther. He later married a Frenchwoman, Marie-Olympe-Adèle Cannette. He held citizenship of Rances and Yverdon — Vaudois to the core, in the particular Protestant-professional way that shaped so much of nineteenth-century Swiss public life.

Basel, Zurich, Neuchâtel

His education was a deliberate assembly of the two halves of the trade. He attended the Realschule — the trade school — in Basel, and served an apprenticeship in Vevey under Samuel Késer-Doret, learning the practical end. Then he went to Zurich, where he studied and worked with Gottfried Semper at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic. Semper was the towering theorist-architect of the German-speaking world, the man whose thinking about the origins of architectural form dominated the century, and to have worked directly with him was an intellectual inheritance as much as a professional credential. Recordon completed the sequence between 1865 and 1868 with Leó Châtelain in Neuchâtel.

He was, in other words, trained by a stonemason's apprenticeship, a technical school, a theorist, and a working practice — in that order. It shows in everything he did afterwards.

The Practice in Vevey

Recordon established his own practice in Vevey in 1874. One of his first substantial civic commissions was the Collège des jeunes filles, the girls' secondary school in Vevey — dated 1873–75 in some records and 1877 in others. A secondary school for girls was not a neutral building type in 1870s Switzerland; it was a physical statement about who the canton intended to educate.

The Montbenon commission followed. English-language records describe the 1877 competition as being for a Palais de Justice and note that despite his third-place finish his design was used and the building completed in 1886; the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland describes the same project as the Federal Court building in Lausanne and records that Recordon oversaw its construction from 1881 to 1886. Either way, it was the largest judicial building in the country and he built it.

In 1889 he placed fifth in the international competition for the Palais de Rumine in Lausanne — a reminder that the near-miss was a recurring feature of his professional life.

Two Professorships

From 1881 to 1890 Recordon taught at the Academy of Lausanne as professor of stereotomy — the geometry of cutting stone, the discipline that governs how a vault or a stair or an arch is drawn out and divided before a single block is quarried. It is the most demanding and least glamorous subject in classical architectural education, and it is precisely the subject that turns a designer into a builder.

In 1890 he took the chair of civil construction at the Federal Polytechnic in Zurich. Sources differ on how long he held it: the Historical Dictionary gives 1890–1896, English-language records give 1890–1916. What is not in dispute is who sat in his lecture rooms. His students included Robert Maillart and Gustav Gull. In 1905 Zurich made him an honorary citizen.

Zurich: Laboratory and Church

He kept building through the professorship. Between 1896 and 1900 he designed the machinery laboratory at the Zurich Polytechnic — a working engineering building for the institution that employed him — and between 1900 and 1902 the French-language Protestant church in Zurich, a piece of denominational and linguistic diplomacy in brick and stone for the Romandy minority in the German-speaking capital of Swiss industry.

Why Benjamin Is Called a Genius

The strongest claim available for Recordon is not aesthetic and not theoretical. It is pedagogical, and it is unusually concrete: he was the professor of civil construction at the Federal Polytechnic in Zurich who taught Robert Maillart. Maillart went on to become one of the most consequential figures in the history of reinforced concrete. Gustav Gull, also his student, became a defining architect of Zurich. A teacher does not get the credit for a student's work, but a chair that produces those two names in one generation was not being held by a mediocrity.

The quality involved is specific and identifiable in his own training: Recordon's whole formation was the joining of theory to construction. He apprenticed under a builder, learned at a trade school, worked with Semper, and then spent a decade teaching stereotomy — the exact discipline in which geometry becomes buildable stone. When he moved to a chair in civil construction, he was teaching the thing he had actually been assembled out of. That is the plausible mechanism by which an engineer like Maillart, whose gift was an intuitive command of how forces travel through material, could emerge from his lecture room.

The honest counter-case is that Recordon's own buildings do not carry a signature idea. A girls' school, a court house, a laboratory, a church: competently and durably done, in the shared historicist manner of the late nineteenth century, and none of them cited as a turning point by any source consulted here. He placed third in the competition for his best-known work and fifth in another. No source calls him a genius. He was an unusually well-rounded and deeply grounded professional whose greatest influence was exercised through other people's hands — which is a real form of significance, and a modest one.

Legacy

Recordon died in Vevey on 19 July 1938, at ninety-two, in the town where he was born, having outlived by decades the Swiss Confederation that first employed him. His court building still stands on the Montbenon terrace. His laboratory still stands in Zurich. And the concrete structures his student Maillart built across the Alps are, in a sense that is hard to measure but not unreal, part of what he taught.

Achievements

• Notable work: tribunal fédéral
• Trained at ETH Zurich