Biography

Austrian architect, born as Andreas Moosbrugger. Trained as a stone mason, his skill led to his involvement in the renovations on the Benedictine monastery at Einsiedeln. In 1682, Moosbrugger entered the Einsiedeln as Brother Caspar. His training as an architect took place during this same period.

Moosbrugger was one of the most important representatives of the "Vorarlberg Baroque" style. Close familial relationships and a strongly unified guild organization, led to a continuity in types of commissions, building methods, and building styles. Architectural development outside the centres of artistic and cultural renewal was determined essentially by the Vorarlberg Baroque school. In contrast to the urban situation, where architects were increasingly imported from Italy, an indigenous architecture characterized the Vorarlberg region from early on. This style borrowed from the late Renaissance, northern Italian ecclesiastical tradition, and its south German counterparts.

Moosbrugger first introduced the radical alternative of ground plan types with central plan-like elements, after decades of development on the wall-pier type church. He also enriched the formal vocabulary of the Vorarlberg school with Italian excess. His calling as a monk and a monastic architect, limited his architectural possibilities.