Building: The Eggs Are Coming

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Perched high on a hill over Switzerland's Lake Geneva is one of the world's strangest-looking abodes, a concrete egg with a huge bay window that often reminds visitors of a flying saucer, a giant clam or a monstrous white mushroom.

There are more houses like it in Pougny, on the French side of the French-Swiss border; near Grenoble there is a similarly constructed new restaurant, and soon there will be a hotel, a psychiatric clinic and a church, all in France, plus a gas station in Belgium and a resort hotel on Minorca—every one built along egg-shaped lines.

The eggs are all coming from the drawing board of Pascal Häusermann, 30, a Swiss architect for whom the laying of ovals is not a stunt but just plain sense. For one thing, egg shapes distribute stresses equally, which means that the chicken-wire forms can be covered by a shell of concrete as thin as two inches. For another, the construction is so simple that a Häusermann house can be completed in two months, cost as little as $12,000. Most important, perhaps, is Häusermann's conviction that "the mistake of modern architects is that they think man needs big, open spaces. This is false. Man has an innate need for intimacy, with the possibility of contemplating grandeur at will." Hence the eggs with their womblike rooms with a view.

Out of the Snake House. Häusermann, who grew up in one of Le Corbusier's concrete apartment houses in Geneva ("It leaked, but we loved it"), became fascinated with egg-shaped structures while studying architecture in London, where he came in contact with the stability studies of Structural Engineer Niels Lisborg. Häusermann's first egg-shaped project was for a zoo snake house, which, though never built, won him top architectural grades. In 1960, he actually built his first egg house for his parents. "Father thought the inside might be too small," he recalls, "so we simply squashed the iron mesh frame down and out a bit."

Pouring the concrete on the mesh frame was so simple and easy that Häusermann needed the help of only two people to finish the house. The top shell is set on the bottom half on ball sockets, and the whole egg is girded round with a reinforced encircling belt. Leakage was a problem until he discovered a putty-like weatherproof paint which formed the perfect seal.

Covering the Planet. Next came what Häusermann and his French architect wife call their "amusement period." Moving into a 32-room, 10th century castle outside Geneva, he experimented briefly with a flying saucer (it rose two feet off the ground before the propeller tore into a wall) and egg houses in plastic (little marvels that could sell for $1,500 that he calls "the perfect solution for weekends and vacations"). But Häusermann's parents' house proved such a conversation piece locally that he was soon inundated with orders for more, including seven concrete egg houses and a model home commissioned by the French woman's magazine, Marie-Claire, for the current six-month-long exposition in Orléans.