CHAMBRE ARCHITECTURE: Home and Hinterland
The Constancy of Carl Jung’s Tower
Carl Jung's Tower, Bollingen, Switzerland
Bollingen Tower, home to Carl Gustav Jung, was a quiet repose for the Swiss
psychologist — his drift away from modernity on the crystalline shores of Lake Zurich.
The tower was a powerful centre, where physical, imaginary, psychological and emotional
factors established the foundations for Jung’s concrete tower.
When we think of home we imagine a building or structure, an immovable mass, but
rarely do we view it as a force or orbit. We might talk fondly about the ‘pull’ of home to
our loved ones; rooted in our arrivals and departures, presences and absences, and the
attractions and repulsions we punctuate our homes with. The art critic and novelist, John
Berger likened the idea of home as the ‘center of the world’, saying that a home was
established ‘at the heart of the real’.
In Bollingen, Jung’s home was oriented on a similar footing to the idea of home as a
centre, where his initial process before building was a ‘confession of faith in stone’. As an
extension to the psychologist’s canon, Jung felt the tower was ‘... in some way a place of
maturation — a maternal womb or a maternal figure in which I could become what I was,
what I am and will be’. In other words, writing in his autobiography Memories, Dreams,
Reflections, ‘It gave me a feeling as if I were being reborn in stone.’
It was settled early on that Jung would build near water. Perhaps this was influenced by
his upbringing, born in the lakeside village of Kesswil, Switzerland. With all its rural charm,
the place had scarcely changed since the Middle Ages. Many posit these beginnings as
the source of Carl Jung’s intimacy with nature and deep affiliation to all living things.
Carl Jung's Tower, Bollingen, Switzerland
Attracted by the ‘scenic charm’ of the upper lake of Zürich, Jung bought land in Bollingen
in 1922. The area of St Meinrad where Jung’s tower was built used to be old church land,
previously belonging to the monastery of St Gall. Building preparations began with Jung’s
original idea of constructing, as he put it, a ‘primitive one-storey dwelling’. He did not
want to build a ‘proper house’, instead wishing for a round structure with a fireplace in the
centre and bunks along the walls.
Jung’s ideas were drawn from the African hut, where the fire burns over a few stones and
‘the whole life of the family revolves around this centre’. Jung notes that ‘primitive huts
concretise an idea of wholeness, a familial wholeness in which all sorts of small domestic
animals likewise participate’. Though these plans were changed for a regular two-storey
house soon after, owing to the fact Jung thought they were too primitive, we can begin to
get a sense of Jung’s urge for simpler, nature-inspired living.
A year later in 1923, the first round house was built; and when it was finished Jung
immediately felt it had become a resting tower, but perhaps more importantly: in Jung’s
mind he was not done. Writing in his autobiography, he said the tower evoked a ‘feeling of
repose and renewal’ that was felt to be ‘intense from the start’. Four years on, in an
attempt to complete his home and centre, a central, annexed structure in the form of a
tower was added. This however did not quell Jung’s architectural desires, and so in 1931
he extended the tower, but within this extension, Jung required a room, and one where he
could exist alone.
Photographs of Carl Gustav Jung. (First Photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1959
He had in mind something he had seen on a trip to India. It was here he saw interiors that
were separated off by a curtain, where inhabitants could retire and unbend, or meditate
and pray. These areas are essential for privacy in an already overpopulated India. Another
four years passed and Jung added a fenced courtyard and loggia by the lake — ‘I needed
a larger space that would stand open to the sky and to nature.’ Thus, turning the structure
into a ‘quarternity’, four different parts were wedded to the building over the course of 12
years. The small central structure saw an upper section added, with the lower section
representing Jung himself, as he put it, ‘I suddenly realised that the small central section
which crouched so low, hidden, was myself! I could no longer hide myself behind the
‘maternal’ and the ‘spiritual’ towers.’
The Gothic character of the tower features vertiginous roofs, arched windows, shutters
and rough stone wall. Serving as a map for Jung’s individual psyche, Bollingen was his
home and home meant everything. This was a concrete retreat, a place to reconnect with
the primal energies of nature and for Jung to connect with his archetypal philosophies.
Carl Jung's Tower, Bollingen, Switzerland
Through the silent language of architecture, Bollingen tower reflects the cyclic process of
the mandala, representing its structural beginnings to its end (Jung was fascinated with
mandalas often drawing them in his works). For contemporary architect, Mark Larson, the
construction of Bollingen Tower was a ‘mystical emergence’ that came to be in stages,
starting with the primitive hut.
Bollingen’s small round tower is inwardly focused and self-referential, and is noted as the
‘maternal tower’ since Jung associated its construction with the death of his mother. The
singular tower is almost entirely composed of stone, originally mined from the quarry on
the opposite side of the lake, with timber framed floors and a hexagon, cone-shaped roof.
Bollingen’s second phase of construction starts to resemble the family home. A two-
storey wing was added to the lone tower, and the house was now aligned with the
shoreline, creating an outdoor space that connected both house and lake. A second
larger entrance, replete with larger windows and more living space suggests Jung wanted
to extend the time he spent there and receive his family for longer periods. The
developments of a foyer, a lower study and a guest-room all added to Jung’s physical and
mental ease at Bollingen; where he lived in relatively crude conditions, ‘I pump the water
from the well. I chop the wood and cook the food. These simple acts make man simple;
and how difficult it is to be simple!’
I pump the water from the well I chop the wood and cook the food. These simple acts make man simple; and how difficult it is to be simple!
Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1961
In 1950, Jung made a monument out of stone to express what the tower meant to him. He
ordered the stones from a nearby quarry. And although the mason wrote down Jung’s
exact measurements for the triangular stone, the quarry sent the wrong measurements
and a square block — as Jung puts it, ‘a perfect cube’. A latin verse by the alchemist
Arnaldus de Villanova came to Jung as the inscription for the stone, and the verse refers
to the alchemist’s stone, the lapis, which was despised and rejected by his peers. Its
translation reads:
Here stands the mean uncomely stone, ’ Tis very cheap in price! The more it is despised by fools, The more loved by the wise
Another inscription on the stone is in Greek and corresponds with three fragments from
Heraclitus; a passage from the Mithras Liturgy and the last from Homer (Odyssey, Book
24, verse 12). On the third face of the stone, another inscription written in Latin reads:
I am an orphan, alone; nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons.
Jung’s architectural shaping of Bollingen over the years came and went in cyclic rhythms,
much like the mandala, freely traversing and dreaming through time and space. And the
psychologist’s ‘expression in stone’ still stands today on the banks of Lake Zürich. It is a
place where Jung proved a harking back to the past — a simpler, more considered way of
living — is to venture into your own psyche, as a gesture or journey of foundation. The
sense of place itself can be constructed, and thus the cyclic formation of our
personalities.
I will leave you finally with this, reader, written by Jung in his chapter on ‘The Tower’,
taken from his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, where Jung reflects on the
modern age and its immediacy, which does not necessarily increase our collective
pleasure or contentment. Jung rather presciently warns us of the unease technology will
bring to our frenetic lives:
We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency,
dissatisfaction, and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on
promises... We refuse to recognise that everything better is purchased at the price
of something worse.... new methods or gadgets, are of course impressive at first,
but in the long run they are dubious and... dearly paid for. They, by no means,
increase the contentment or happiness of people on the whole. Mostly they are
deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications which
unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever.
before.
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