Hannes Meyer’s Kinderheim Mümliswil: From Utopian 'Home' to National Memorial by Tatiana Efrussi / TPOD, ACHT, THEMA, HITAM

In the center of this current research is the 1939 building of the cooperative children’s home in the village of Mümliswil (SO) and the memory practices around it. The holiday house in the Solothurn Jura was designed by Hannes Meyer. The chosen forms, especially a circular "Pestalozzi table" were considered as a powerful means to affect the children’s consciousness and health. Ten years after the opening, the experimental temporary "home" regularly hosted children who were placed there by the institutions in charge of the childhood questions. Those placements, as well as decisions to separate children from their families, were often carried out arbitrary and violent. Today, the building was transformed into a National Memorial Site for Children in Homes and Indentured Children (Verdingkinder) by Guido Fluri, one of the children who spent some time in the Kinderheim in the 1970s.

Tatiana Efrussi, Dr. Rer. Pol., is an architecture historian and a visual artist. Efrussi studied art history at the Moscow State Lomonosov University, video and media art at the Rodchenko School for Photography and Media Art in Moscow, fine art at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She curated the exhibition "Bauhaus in Moscow" (2012) at the Museum of the Moscow Architectural Institute, worked as a research consultant for the traveling exhibition "The City of Tomorrow," (2019–2020), collaborated with the "Bauhaus Imaginista" project (2018–2019). In 2020 she defended her thesis "Hannes Meyer—A Soviet Architect. Life and Work in the Soviet Union, 1930-1936" at the Kassel University (Germany). Tatiana Efrussi is based in Paris, since 2022 she is a member of the association Atelier des artistes en exil.

Neighbours Lecture Series Vol. 3

13/3 - Pier Vittorio Aureli (EPFL). Architecture and Abstraction: Book Launch with Sarah Nichols, Christophe van Gerrewey, and Alfredo Thiermann
20/3 - Tatiana Efrussi (L’atelier des artistes en exil). Hannes Meyer’s Kinderheim Mümliswil: From Utopian 'Home' to National Memorial
27/3 - Sarah Gainsforth (Journalist). Challenging the New Housing Question
10/4 - Claire Zimmerman (University of Toronto). Industrial Architecture, Situated in the Twentieth Century
24/4 - Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid). Against the Commons: Elements for a Radical Planning Theory
1/5 - Spyros Papapetros (Princeton University). Pre/Architecture
8/5 - Anna-Maria Meister (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz: Max Planck Institute, KIT and saai archive Karlsruhe). Fragile Objects, Coded Knowledge
15/5 - Platon Issaias (Architectural Association) & Ioanna Theocharopoulou (Columbia University). On the Polykatoikia and its Discontents