Johannes Meiner (1867–1941) ran a photographic studio in Zurich’s Metropol House, working across all genres: portraits, architecture, urban views, advertising. His speciality was stereoscopy — a format whose square constraint, once reframed, fits naturally into the Karo. His plates document Zurich between approximately 1890 and 1920, and are today held at the Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich, the institution in collaboration with which this selection was assembled by Ylva Meyer.
The Dolder Grand Hotel opened in 1899 on the western slope of the Adlisberg, above the city. It was designed by the Basel architect Jacques Gros in a Swiss timber construction style, combining the aesthetics of a mountain resort with the standards of a luxury establishment. The hotel was accessible from the city by the Dolderbahn funicular, inaugurated in 1893, and from 1899 by the Doldertram connecting the funicular’s mountain station directly to the hotel entrance. Meiner photographs it within a year or two of its opening.
What he frames here is not the building but the terrace. The telescope — a large refracting instrument on a wooden tripod — occupies the right foreground, providing the depth plane that gave stereoscopic photographs their spatial effect. The figures are arranged accordingly: the boy looking through the eyepiece, the woman and three other children distributed across the middle distance. This is the compositional logic of the stereoview: objects and people are placed to create the illusion of three-dimensional space when seen through the viewer. The Zürichberg forest serves as backdrop. The hotel itself is out of frame. The original wooden structure of 1899 was demolished in 1972; the facade was restored to its 1899 appearance following a renovation completed in 2008.
The plate
Stereoscopic glass slide titled “Zürich, Dolder-Grand Hôtel, Terrasse mit Fernglas.” Selected from the Johannes Meiner holdings at the Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich. Dated c. 1910. Piezography® Pro print on Awagami Bamboo Washi, 250 g/m² — made by the Awagami Factory in Tokushima, Japan, directed by the Fujimori family for eight generations, within a washi tradition in the Awa region dating to the 7th century. 30 × 30 cm. Edition of 200, Zürich.
