Karl Moser

Moser's candidacy for the ETH professorship drew objections over his age, architectural outlook and continuing private practice. He was nevertheless appointed after his professional experience and body of work were judged favourably. At ETH Zurich, he reorganised the architectural curriculum, giving construction a more prominent place alongside the teaching of architectural history and design.

Moser gradually adopted a more interactive approach to teaching. In later years, some of his seminars centred on the joint discussion of architectural problems rather than formal lectures. He also supported younger architects working in modern architecture. As a competition juror, he also supported modern architecture, notably in the 1927 competition for the League of Nations headquarters in Geneva, where he supported a first prize for Le Corbusier.

By the 1920s, he was mentoring architects associated with the architectural avant-garde. His students included architects who later became prominent representatives of the New Building movement. Among them were Werner Moser, Max Ernst Haefeli and Rudolf Steiger, who later formed the architectural partnership Haefeli Moser Steiger.

Independent work and modernism

Moser initially worked with historical styles. Around 1910, he began using more restrained and classical forms. His Fluntern Church, completed in 1920, was designed in a Neoclassical style. In the early 1920s, Moser and the architect Paul Ulrich developed a small group of houses on Rainstrasse in Wollishofen. The houses had simpler, more uniform forms than the earlier Jugendstil villas. Moser was also interested in contemporary Dutch architecture and exchanged ideas with younger architects at ETH Zurich.

St. Anton Church in Basel was among the principal works of Moser's independent career. It represented the culmination of his church architecture. Switzerland’s first church built with exposed concrete, the building left its concrete exposed on both the interior and exterior. The interior is a high three-aisled hall, with the central nave supported by slender concrete piers. The stained-glass windows were designed by Hans Stocker and Otto Staiger. Completed in 1927, it became an internationally recognised early landmark of modern concrete architecture. Its exposed concrete attracted both admiration and criticism when the church opened. The church was placed under monument protection in 1987.

Moser continued to develop the Kunsthaus after the end of the Curjel & Moser partnership. A rear addition incorporating a reading room was completed, while later expansion proposals remained unrealised. During the 1930s, Moser increasingly aligned his work with the New Building movement, and his later Kunsthaus proposals incorporated ideas associated with contemporary modernist architecture.

Beyond St. Anton Church, his Zurich practice designed housing estates with social facilities for Swiss industrial companies, as well as commercial buildings in Baden and Schaffhausen. His post office in Baden, opened in 1931, was later altered and expanded several times by Haefeli Moser Steiger, whose members included his son Werner M. Moser.

In a 1933 redevelopment plan for Zurich’s Niederdorf, Moser proposed replacing most of the historic buildings with simple cubic structures. Only a small number of monuments were to be retained. The wider plan included roughly 30 high-rise buildings. The Grossmünster, Rathaus and Kunsthaus were among the existing buildings that would have remained. Moser's proposal was influenced by Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin.