“Food for thought”. Il viaggio lento da Venezia all’India di Dolf Schnebli (1928-2009)

Dolf Schnebli was an important Swiss architect and professor of ETH Zurich. In 1955 he won the Arthur W. Wheelwright travelling fellowship organised by the Harvard School of Design and this allowed him to travel for a year outside the United States. The following year he set off with his wife Clarissa for a slow and long journey to the East that deeply affected his professional life and his future teaching experience. The journey started in Venice, then they travelled eastwards through Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. The last city visited before coming back to Europe was Chandigarh, built by Le Corbusier, still under construction. During the journey, he used to take photos of places and people. Some years later he called his photographs photoschetches to emphasise their synthetic nature in framing places and special conditions of spaces. The memories of his journey have remained unknown for fifty years. It was only in 2009 that he reorganised the photoschetches to publish them. The book, One Year from Venice to India by the Land Route, is a collection of photos with short texts. In the postscript Schnebli wrote that their slow journey to India still provides, after more than fifty years, "food for thought", underlining the value of travel as nourishment. The ideas and suggestions about places and different spaces visited in that year became important references for his architecture. The Wheelwright gave him the opportunity to travel to another world and discover very different cultures. The experience also contributed to build a personal imaginary world that the architect used continuously and creatively in his works.