Originally designed as a retreat house for the Capuchin order, the Franziskushaus is located on a forest hillside near Dulliken, a village near Olten in the Swiss midlands. Based on Le Corbusier’s La Tourette monastery in France, the bold, interlocking concrete structure comprises over 80 bedrooms, various meeting rooms, a large kitchen, an auditorium and a chapel. Architect Otto Glaus, a trained painter and decorator who worked with Le Corbusier in Paris, also designed the furniture and interiors. With the ascetic charm of a brutalist Prussian reformatory, the interfaith education centre and retreat is one of the most radical examples of post-war Swiss sacral architecture and was listed as a historic monument in 2012.

After a failed repositioning as an international student campus in the same year, Franziskus House is now a ‘lost space’. In 2023, the concrete icon was brutally torn from its Sleeping Beauty state by three fires and various acts of vandalism. With numerous broken windows and disfigured by large-scale graffiti, it is questionable whether Franziskus House can – or will – ever be brought back to life.