Willy Boesiger was born in Langenthal in 1904. He trained as a construction draughtsman and later became an architect. His years of training and travelling took him to Paris, where he worked in Le Corbusier's studio by the end of the 1920s. Along the way, he designed the new building for Bösiger AG, his father's carpentry in Langenthal – a commercial building in the style of Le Corbusier with a workshop, office, sales rooms, and a flat. In the 1930s, Willy Boesiger (who had adopted the French spelling of his name) moved to Zurich, where he socialised with artists, writers, and intellectuals.
In 1935, he acquired a building on Limmatquai, where he set up the "Café Select" as Zurich's first boulevard café, modelled on Parisian literary cafés. The Select quickly became a meeting place for the avant-garde in the city. In the same building, he also planned and realised Zurich's first studio cinema, the Nord-Süd, together with artist Anna Indermaur. In 1935, he also designed the Folding Table for Café Select, which was frequented by Rudolf Lehni junior. The table became part of the Lehni collection.
Boesiger began publishing Le Corbusier's "Oeuvre complète" as early as 1929. Completed in 1965, the eight-volume work has become a key publication of international modernism. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich awarded Boesiger an honorary doctorate in 1980 for his editorial achievements. He died in Zollikon in 1990.