This Artist’s Brave New World Stands Hidden in a Swiss Forest

After dubiously scanning the steep road we were about to climb in the muggy summer heat, I hoped the destination would be worth the trek.

Gravel crunched beneath our shoes as we started out, and my Swiss friend, Christine, tantalized me with clues about what this small stretch of forest in Dietikon would disclose.

“This man has been making things up there for years,” she said, fixing her eyes on a gleaming silver tower that poked up through the trees.

“They are sort of sculptures. I hear some of the townspeople don’t like his work because they can see a bit of it from down here. But it’s his land, so they cannot stop him.”

Shades of Simon Rodia, I thought.

A dark brook burbled next to the road, bordering colorful plots of a cooperative garden. My summer-long quest for ripe blackberries finally came to an end.

Puckering mightily over a few sour seducers that looked better than they tasted, I eventually came across a sun-warmed clump of ripe, plump fruit that sent me into berry-lover’s bliss.

After 10 minutes of walking the peaceful, fern-lined road, we rounded one last clump of bushes and were confronted by an enormous, grimacing tiki-god face.

Many of the sculptures and structures I saw defied categorization. It was tricky to guess which myth or period--or universe, for that matter--served as their inspiration.

Animal likenesses looked half-human, humans took on the strangest shapes, and a single piece sometimes made use of tile and stone, glass and steel. Everywhere I saw a melange of styles melded with panache and humor.

I admired the flaring nostrils and deeply knit concrete eyebrows of Mr. Tiki-God. Christine and I gladly deposited the 2-franc donation requested by a hand-lettered sign. Then we strolled through the tiki’s mouth toward more artistic adventure.

Figurines were everywhere--peeking through the trees, hiding in the brush. Not knowing which to examine first, we turned toward the biggest, a house that was more like a sculpture. Christine handed me a brochure on all this art-in-progress.

I’d requested that she ask the artist a few questions in his native German, but she was intimidated by the man’s eccentric reputation. Now she was off the hook. We sat down in the shade and she slowly translated the basic history of the place.

Bruno Weber, 57, is a Swiss artist who has been turning out his own brand of sculpture and architecture for years. Between fulfilling art commissions around Europe, he has developed his own artistic paradise in Dietikon since 1962. Friends help with some of the construction, but all of the designs are Weber’s.

Our eyes followed pounding sounds, and we saw the bearded artist high upon a scaffold, hauling up winged, horned plaster creatures as a companion hammered away on an intricate metal design on the roof. That was the closest contact we had with Weber during our visit.

By the time we left, I reasoned that to view Weber’s works was to know the man--on some level, anyway.

He was busy at work on a house. Writhing and swirling, Inca-styled dragons made the balcony railing a sea of motion. Meanwhile, well-endowed nude maidens frolicked with unicorns, serpents and Pan figures on a luridly-colored mural stretching across an entire wall.

More tikis (these gleaming metal monsters were tikis from space, I decided) stood sentry on the roof in various states of comically pop-eyed, jagged-toothed horror.

And crowning the structure was an unsightly, corrugated-steel smokestack of a thing. Perhaps it was something functional, like a chimney. Or maybe it was a covering for some yet-to-be revealed bit of whimsy.

After taking in that riot of color and shape, Christine urged me on.

“Many things to see,” she insisted. So we walked on, and were confronted by a twin-peaked, 30-foot pyramid with smiling brown-and-white faces and arms affixed over the shiny, decoratively hammered-metal sheeting.

Every way we turned we were greeted by cast-plaster chairs of bare-chested Buddha and Confucius likenesses. Weber’s work reflects an admiration for function embellished with style.

We also saw it in the beautiful, mosaic-tiled table, shaped like some crazy Flintstone-era pelican. Each little seat encircling the table perched upon a single clawed bird foot.

Even the mosaic serpent, perhaps 60 feet long, had steps set into its humps for daring wanderers who wanted a snake-back view of the forest.

Every narrow path we walked eventually revealed some creative, even peculiar, payoff. Christine’s favorites were the gray stone fingers the height of toddlers that we saw in the grass.

There was something strangely endearing about these gigantic human digits with leonine tails, as they crouched on little animal legs and arched blindly toward observers.

Artistic vision run amok, some might say. But crunching back down the hill again, I felt cheered by Weber’s crazy, colorful, nonconformist way of enriching the forest in which he lives.

Dietikon is about 10 miles west of Zurich. To get to Bruno Weber’s art park, officially called Weinrebenpark, park at the Stadthalle (city hall), walk straight up the road called Familiegarten Weg, and veer right past the house with a picket fence.