Bärtschi's image archive at the ETH

Hans-Peter Bärtschi (1950-2022) was a Swiss architect, author and photographer as well as a historian of technology and economics. He studied architecture at ETH Zurich under Aldo Rossi, among others, with whom he also wrote his thesis. With his dissertation on "Industrialisation, railway battles and urban development", he was awarded a doctorate in engineering under Jean-Francois Bergier and Paul Hofer. In Winterthur, he founded the office Arias - Architektur Industriearchäologie Stadtentwicklung. Even during his studies, he was committed to the preservation of cultural assets in the structure of architecture. He founded "ARIAS-Industriekultur" in 1979 in order to facilitate the documentation and restoration of industrial monuments. At the same time, he curated exhibitions on industrial history in numerous museums, such as a commitment to the former Mühlerama brewery since 1981.

Bärtschi was also the author of numerous publications on technology, architecture and the history of building technology, including for radio and television programmes. He compiled an enormous amount of knowledge on the recent history of Switzerland and also documented the changes in other parts of the world on his travels to 120 countries. During his working life, he also took around 260,000 photos of the industrial world of work, which he and Sylvia Bärtschi-Baumann transferred to the Industrial Heritage Foundation and bequeathed to it. He was the correspondent for the magazine Industriekultur for Switzerland. Hans-Peter Bärtschi was the pioneer of "Swiss industrial archaeology" and fought for the "rescue of witnesses to Switzerland's great industrial era" and against the one-sided myth of the rural idyll.