Swiss significance.

For a small landlocked country Switzerland has packed in a great deal of architecture. Density and quality is reflected in the Deutsches Architektur Museum's fifth exhibition focusing on twentieth-century Europe.

The DAM's survey of 140 projects starts with chronological tables of urban development, world architecture 1850-1969, and a synopsis of Swiss architecture 1950-1980. The visitor is mesmerized by the exacting nature of the Swiss character, the need to order and quantify. Divided by three languages and difficult terrain, Switzerland has forged a national identity which both binds and allows for federal freedom. In a culture of watches, chocolate and myth makers, the extreme topography of the Alps has come to symbolize Switzerland. Traversing, researching and taming the mountains is a national cultural activity.

In 1863 the first Schirmhauser (umbrella huts) of the Swiss Alpine Club were no more than dry walls protecting a rocky outcrop. By 1927 there were 106 as the original purpose of the Club (to research Alpine topography) shifted to an interest in experiencing the Alps recreationally, through mountaineering and skiing. Convalescent homes for tuberculosis patients, such as Sanatorium Schatzalp in Davos (1900) by Pfleghard & Haefeli, equipped with conversation salons, lecture rooms and restaurants, were nothing other than luxury hotels with laboratories, precursors of mass alpine tourism, as described so presciently by Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain.

Switzerland's transport infrastructure was, from the beginning, innovative and Modernist. Robert Maillart's Salginatobel bridge in Schiers (1929) is an icon of the century. The temporary works alone were a breathtaking feat of the industrial age. Heinz Isler's 1968 concrete shells at Deitingen motorway service station, built as prototypes for a string of service stations which never materialized, influenced a generation of students. Isler went on to complete over 1000 other shell structures. In railway architecture, Santiago Calatrava's 1991 Stadelhofen Zurich station (AR January 1991) composed of sculptured concrete caves, is the latest in a line of development that began with Hans Hilfiker's 1954 Winterthur station platform roofs. These took the form of cantilevered concrete wings with edge strip lighting and also incorporated the lucid, precise typography for which Switzerland has achieved a reputation. The Swiss special relationship with mass fair-faced concrete is again evident in Herzog & de Meuron's 1996 Basle Locomotive Depot, a bunker with industrial rooftop glazing.

While the picturesque agrarian image is the one most promoted by the Swiss government and tourist agencies, in reality Switzerland's valleys are full of factories circumscribed by motorways at the hub of Europe's continental road transport system. Corum and Cartier watch factories and distribution centres use their glass facades as autobahn advertisement billboards with etched graphics large enough for high-speed reading. Jean Tschumi's 1960 Nestle AG administration building of open planning, metal framed furniture, and an early form of dry wall partitioning, exemplifies the nation's obsession for correctness and cleanliness in the face of rising air pollution. Fritz Haller built his 1987 USM furniture factory using the MAXI steel building block system, with possibilities for extension as rational and ordered as the products it houses. Not only is industry polluting the scenery. Debate still rages over the occupation of a whole valley for the open-air swimming pools of Freibad Bellinzona in 1970.

Despite its reputation for bank secrets and financial independence, community and social responsibilities are not neglected. A whole floor of the exhibition is devoted to schools. Housing Siedlungs needed engineering solutions which gave rise to such terraced mountainside development as Halen (1955-61) by Atelier 5. Under the title 'Cults and Culture', another floor is devoted to religious architecture from Rudolf Steiner's anthropomorphic Goetheanum to Walter M. Forderer's mountain village church of St Nicholas in Heremence (1971). A topography of isolated valleys is perhaps the ideal setting for sects and closed orders.

Positioned at the crossroads of Europe, Switzerland has simultaneously absorbed and reinterpreted twentieth-century Modernism, producing both the Tessin school and the present architectural movement of simplicity with its emphasis on the wesentlich (significant), resulting in a stripped down architecture of extremely plain boxes. Yet in a society in which ostentatious displays of affluence are politically taboo, austerity has come to signify richness.