Jakob Ragaz

Jakob Ragaz (29 September 1846 – 27 May 1922) was a Swiss architect. He is best known for his work on a series of "grand hotels" built in connection with the Swiss tourism boom during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Life Jakob Ragaz was born into a family of craftsmen in Tamins, a village in the canton of Grisons, located a short distance to the west of Chur and close to the point where the "Hinterrhein" and "Vorderrhein" rivers join together and become the River Rhine. He attended the cantonal secondary school ("Scola chantunala grischuna") in Chur and then moved on to study at polytechnical academies in Stuttgart and Munich. As a newly trained architect he received his first commission in the Engadin valley, where his father, Linhard Ragaz, had been employed as a carpenter in the 1840s. He took on project management for construction of the "Hotel Bernina" in Samedan, which the architect Johann Jakob Breitinger had abandoned in order to focus on a city planning scheme in his home city of Zürich.

His brother Georg died in 1909 after which the building business was taken over by the Samedan firm, "Koch, Vonesch & Co". Jakob Ragaz went back to Tamins where he died in 1922.

His papers are held by the Cantonal Archive in Chur.