Maurice Braillard

An architect, planner and politician who made his life in Geneva, Maurice Braillard was professionally active in Switzerland and France between 1904 and 1957, leaving behind him a substantial and many-sided body of work.

Animated by a social vision, a visual thinker who developed his projects through drawing, Braillard did his boldest work in the Twenties and Thirties. An overriding concern of the first period, marked by the building of the Mairie d’Onex and of the Cité d’Ugine (Savoie), is the architectural integration of art and craftsmanship. Gradually, however, Braillard extended his investigations. In novel programmes, such as that of the Salève Aerial Cable-Car, he developed a Modernist plastic grammar of great evocative power. In housing projects in Geneva – the Maison Ronde, the Cité Vieusseux and the Squares de Montchoisy – he focussed on the functional aspects and on promoting a sense of a shared neighbourhood life through a valorisation of intermediate spaces where private and public spheres intersected.

Maurice Braillard introduced a new sensitivity to modern urban planning in adapting morphology to topography and attending to the differentiation of public space.

Finally, even before his appointment as head of the Geneva Department of Public Works (1933 – 1936), he turned his attention to questions of planning and urbanism. In unrealised projects for the Rive Droite and in his overall development plan for Geneva (Plan Directeur, 1935) he introduced a new sensitivity to modern urban planning in adapting morphology to topography and attending to the differentiation of public space.

His work was honoured by the City of Geneva, which named a street a street after him in Moillebeau. The Canton of Geneva also expressed its recognition of his work in listing an ensemble from the Thirties as a historic monument: the Maison Ronde.

The Maurice Braillard Sketchbook contains many of his preparatory sketches.