Description
Book SynopsisFounded by Swiss settlers in 1845, New Glarus in Wisconsin evolved from being a dairy farming and cheese production village to a popular tourist destination. Following a grave economic downturn in the 1960s and 1970s, the community discovered embracing the image of its cultural heritage, particularly traditional architectural details, as a way of survival. Consequently, they began to 'Swissify' their commercial building façades and so to appear even more Swiss. Since 1999, the town has even regulated the production of new buildings via its building codes to preserve this particular aesthetic evoking the familiar traditional Swiss Chalet style.
Swissness Applied - New Glarus and Its Image of Cultural Heritage investigates the transformation of European immigrant towns in the United States, exemplified by New Glarus, WI. It features the results of extensive fieldwork on buildings in the village as well as design projections based on the local building code, and evaluates the outcomes through different representation techniques. Expert authors including Whitney Moon, Philip Ursprung, Kurt Forster, and Jesús Vassallo contribute essays that pick up on aspects such as the role of cultural imagery and immigration history in architecture, and on Swissness as a cultural concept in particular.
Trade Review"
Swissness Applied is much more than history... Normally, for this reviewer, the success of a book about a particular place is gauged by its ability to instill a desire to go and see the place in person. This book... doesn’t have to: its emphasis on the role of images in constructing a place means that seeing images of New Glarus is sufficient. Those images in their multifarious nature (old and new, Switzerland and America, drawings and models, buildings both real and imagined) provide plenty to learn from, though they also spark a lot of joy — not an easy feat in an architecture book." * World-Architects *
