Johann Jakob Breitinger

Johann Jakob Breitinger (30 January 1814 - 15 March 1880) was a Swiss architect.

Early years Johann Jakob Breitinger was born to Protestant parents in Dinhard, a village north of Winterthur in the Canton of Zürich. He was orphaned at an early age, attending school in Horgen and Zürich. In 1830 he embarked on an apprenticeship with the then newly established construction business of Locher & Cie in Zürich. Between 1832 and 1837 he worked as a wandering journeyman in Neuchâtel, Paris and Berlin, though it is unclear whether this period involved any formal further study. There was no appropriate education establishment in Neuchâtel, although in Berlin the Bauakademie (building academy) was taking students by the mid-1830s. It is, in any case, evident from Breitinger's later work that he was strongly influenced by several leading Berlin architects of the time including Friedrich August Stüler. Heinrich Strack, Eduard Knoblauch and, particularly, Karl Friedrich Schinkel. That deficiency would be remedied by the creation during the 1850s of the "Polytechnikum Academy", followed by the emergence from it of a subsequent generation of architecture students taught and mentored by the formidable Gottfried Semper. Between 1865 and 1867 Breitinger teamed up with these recently trained younger architects to put forward a major development plan for the city of Zürich.

Unfortunately, many of Breitinger's Zürich buildings no longer exist. One that survived in the heart of the city, thanks to a referendum conducted in response to a contentious redevelopment plans in the 1960s, which has more recently been imaginatively and carefully restored, is the "Great Minster Chapel", built between 1858 and 1860, across the Zwingliplatz beyond the Theological Faculty in the former cloisters of the "Great Minster", in the "Old town". The chapel applies a Swiss vision the so-called English Tudor Gothic style, with a large fountain on the west side of the building. Breitinger achieved significant additional interior floor space by using a polygonal floor plan which pushes through, far into the adjacent pre-existing "helper building". Fountain and chapel are both part of a more ambitious (otherwise unrealised) plan that Breitinger had drawn up in 1858 for a renovation of the Medieval "Helferei Quarter".

After the Great Fire, which destroyed two thirds of Glarus in 1861, Breitinger relocated and involved himself in a number of important building projects. His contributions included modern residential developments which he undertook with his pupil Johann Heinrich Reutlinger (1841–1913).

In 1876 he relocated again, this time to Weesen (St. Gallen) where he continued working for the rest of his life, notably on plans for the Protestant church at Siebnen and for the Stachelberg thermal resort (LinthalGL), completed posthumously in 1881.