Banco Continental, Lima, 1959. Photo courtesy Mario Bianco Archives

Within a year of arriving in Lima, Cron had built his first project: a block of four duplex apartments conceived as homes for unattached artists—a typology so unusual at the time that the project’s builder had to justify its validity to the municipality in order to obtain construction permits. That project on Calle Roma in the neighborhood of San Isidro captured, with the clarity and maturity of a more senior designer, many of the aesthetic preoccupations that would go on to define Cron’s output: pure geometries; large windows shielded by wooden screens, which adapted the ingenious box balconies of colonial Lima to the modern idiom; ceramic tile floors that deflected warm light onto whitewashed walls; and a conscientious approach to urban scale. Compared to neighboring houses, which tended to copy colonial motifs as historicist pastiche, Cron “took those same elements and abstracted them,” Schweig says. “He was not a traditionalist,” as architect and historian Markus Breitschmid notes in his essay in Arce and Schweig’s book, “but neither was he a modernist revolutionary, dogmatic and blind to history.”

Over the decade that followed, Cron built at least 35 projects in and around Lima that deepened and amplified the explorations begun in the building on Calle Roma. Staggered volumes unfurled against a backdrop of arid mountains, like the low-slung skylines of Andean villages. Stone retaining walls and trapezoidal buttresses recalled the forms and materials of Inca construction. Wooden screens and handmade tiles—sometimes, as in the 1952 Peruvian-Swiss Insurance Company building, arranged in geometric patterns reminiscent of the textiles that Cron collected throughout his time in Peru—gestured both to colonial architecture and the living crafts of indigenous communities.

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Cron's home and studio in Lima, 1955 (1); Casa Ferreyros, 1952 (2). Photos courtesy Bindler and Cron Family Archives

Cron pushed subtly at the boundaries of modernist dogma, playing an essential role in the development of a rooted national Modernism in Peru, much as Alvar Aalto did in Finland and Luis Barragán in Mexico. “Cron is still a model of modernity in Lima, a reference to emulate,” Arce says. Yet his work, most of which has been demolished or altered beyond recognition over the years, is practically unknown outside Lima. Even in his native Switzerland, Cron is barely a footnote, a historical lacuna deepened by the borderline biblical disasters—a fire sparked by a terrorist attack, a flood—that destroyed much of his archives in the last half century.

Drawing of Casa Ferreyros, Lima, 1952. Image courtesy Municipalidad de San Isidro Archives

And ultimately, Cron’s time in Peru was brief. In January 1963, his struggles with depression having reached a crisis, he arrived at his sister’s house in the suburbs of Basel, carrying a suitcase stuffed with much of his prized collection of pre-Columbian textiles: the moth-eaten remains of the life he’d built in Lima. He spent that year in and out of mental institutions and, in February 1964, on a family trip to the ski resort of Klosters, took a tranquilizer, boarded the funicular to the top of the mountain, and wandered out into the snow. There, looking out over receding peaks that must have reminded him of Peru’s soaring Cordillera Blanca, he froze to death in the long Alpine night, so near and so far from home.

The lobby of Edificio de la Compañía Peruano-Suiza, an office building in central Lima, 1952. Photo courtesy Bindler and Cron Family Archives

TH. Cron, edited by Irene Arce and Johann Schweig and published in Spanish by Mirada Libre, is available for purchase here.