Stöckacker, Bern — Area Guide & Where to Stay

What are the main landmarks in Stöckacker?

The estates are the architecture here. Bern's building department put up the first municipal blocks of flats of the post-war period at Stöckacker between 1944 and 1946, to designs by Walter Haemmig and the office of Lutstorf. Meienegg followed.

Hans and Gret Reinhard built it for the Familienbaugenossenschaft between 1949 and 1955, the first entirely cooperative development of its kind in Bern and a landmark in the city's social history. The heritage inventory calls it worth keeping. A newer scheme replaced the first estate, and the winning Regina design by two Zurich offices put up three angled four-storey buildings holding 146 flats of several kinds.

What is the history of Stöckacker?

Woodland covered this ground first. The Stöckwaldung stood here until 1798, when the French general Pigeon quartered six thousand men on the Bümplizfeld during his march on Bern and the troops cut the wood for fuel until little of it was left. Bümpliz never replanted it.

The clearing was approved after the fact in 1826, and the commune preferred to hold the land in reserve for housing rather than grow trees on it again. Parcels went to twenty-eight buyers in 1882. A clause forbade building on them at any time and under any circumstances, and building went ahead regardless, which is how Stöckacker became the workers' quarter of Bümpliz.

Taxes finished the argument. The people here worked in Bern and paid their taxes there while sending their children to Bümpliz schools, and the cost of that pushed Bümpliz toward the merger the ballot of October 1918 finally settled.

Where is Stöckacker?

Stöckacker takes the west of Bern inside Stadtteil VI Bümpliz-Oberbottigen, bounded by Blumenfeld and Untermatt toward Bethlehem, by Bodenweid and Schwabgut toward Bümpliz, and by Weyermannshaus and Ausserholligen toward Mattenhof-Weissenbühl.