switzerland

berne across a bridge

‘so! how was switzerland!!!??’ everyone seems to asking me. and i wonder how i should be answering? so i say ‘great!’ being genuinely happy to get away from the traffic jams on the highway for a week; and ‘pretty!’ doing my best not to let a trace of metropolitan irony tinge my enthusiasm for a country perfect in every way. truly.

was in berne to deliver a lecture at the architecture forum berne on the landscape of the city and how it was changing. also took some time to go to basel for two days and then zurich for a day before coming back.

berne was extraordinarily picturesque. i was put up in a family run bred and breakfast in the main town which is on a narrow steep hill marked by churches on both ends and a central main street of cobbled stone where i have seen karisma kapoor and govinda shake many a hip. on the main road it has been legislated that the summer months be celebrated by placing flowers in the balcony (my room overlooked the main road and was thus decorated? this to make certain the city’s world heritage status. however, for poor juerg who is out of the city for most of the year, he has had to substitute the real for the fake flowers from a local shop- not having anyone at home to water them.

one of the short cuts in the city

although i had taken a walk down the main street the first day i was there, the next day juerg had been kind enough provide me with a local guide. claude walked me up a hill for a view that looked straight out of grimms fairy tales and then at the other end near the railway station took me to the place where the alternative seems to live. a building with barbed wire on all sides that has decided itself to be an independent state. a old horse stable that has in a typically swiss form of self discipline decided to create its own bounded sense of disorder. the architecture has been thus embroidered with graffiti and iconography.

claude told me that this place was the scene of riots a few weeks back and was gleefully picked up as headline news by american news networks that loved to watch the peaceful swiss suffer some of the tensions of the rest of the world that they seem so miraculously free of.

the alternative center

but claude also told me another story. he said that there are more guns loaded and free ins switzerland than in the use. it seems that the compulsory proscription of young men in the army leaves them with loaded firearms in possession just in case, you know, france attacks. claude himself did not have a gun because he begged out of the army claiming philosophical incompatibilities- he is a pacifist he claimed and had to answer to a panel who asked him pointed questions trying to test out his commitment to gandhi.

another one of the eccentricities of extreme order. this seemed to be the end of all possibilities for change. death. i guess. a very pretty death. but then i seem to be again donning that annoyingly superior voice of the third world cynic. claiming joy in disorder and happiness in madness. i wonder whether it is a shield or a weapon?

it came dangerously close to being the leprosy ridden arm of a beggar as he displays it for alms in the car window at the lecture. a frightening vision for myself. how do you come to terms with showing the madness of the mumbai landscape in the pristine air of berne?

the lecture was held in a refurbished grain storage in the center of town. gorgeous hall. around 60 people attended and asked curious polite questions while i seemed to take on the air of an ironic outsider. when i looked back at the entire episode i was pretty embarrassed by my shameless display of edges to upset their stability.

it was maybe the perpetual politeness that did to me. like bankers. the landscape is also bereft of any of the edges i have become accustomed to. was i then the errant child throwing a tantrum, demanding attention for being who i am? whatever.. the lecture went well. i guess i was merely entertaining them. or giving them what they did not expect- no exotic india. or was it on the other hand over-exoticizing india? damn! this is a dead end.

but india is the flavor of the month in berne too. ‘horn please’ was the name of an exhibition on contemporary indian art. and as i walked around with juerg past atul, archana, jitish, patwardhan, nalini i was thoroughly confused about what relevance these works could have for him. and true enough, he looked baffled at most of it. cant blame him. but then how come i was completely fascinated by the rothko and mondrian upstairs?

in berne the only real starchitecture i saw was the paul klee museum- renzo pianos diagram of a squiggle transformed into three metal hills rising from the ground. the diagram unfortunately ended up being the building. beautifully made but a little unaffecting. the klee drawings inside were incredible.

paul klee museum

otherwise i saw some cool reuse of old buildings- like the kornhouse in whose basement there was also a gorgrous restaurant with painted ceilings and a huge golden beer keg; and the toblerone factory that has been converted into a library for the university. also juerg took me for a tour of some atelier 5 housing projects where the type seemed more complex and where nature had begun to engulf the form finished concrete within.

the toblerone factory

atelier 5 housing

the restaurant at the kornhouse

starchitecture wise the trip to basel was far more fruitful. if the klee museum was too much of a diagram to be great building, the piano building in basel was amazing. red stone walls holding up a floating glass roof and a labyrinth of spaces with a gallery that looks out over the rolling dunes of the swiss landscape. beautiful. and ‘spatial’ unlike so much of the other famous buildings i saw.

foundation reyeler - renzo piano

a herzog and de meuron skin

architecture seems to have collapsed into building the envelope- only. shimmering glass with moiré patterns, frosted milkiness, structural ingenuity and gleaming metallic surfaces, from the filigree of herzog and de meuron to the stark neo modernism of diener and diener. nothing to complain about really. very tasteful. was on the other hand more impressed by the gehry vitra office building with its central courtyard of criss crossing bridges and twisting forms. but to be fair the herzog and de meuron signal box with metal strips turning upwards to open out the box was stunning and so was the schaulager museum where the skin transformed the box into a muscular prism born out of the earth framing a replica of an iconic home and screens projecting art. while their sports stadium reveled in a multi media skin michael adler's smaller gentler stadium was all understated elegance. just across it were hans hoffman's wonderfully monumental gates on the rhein. infrastructure as architecture. something we need to perhaps do in the fourth year design studio.

schaulager

signal box - herzog and de meuron

herzog and de meuron - football stadium

gehry

my searches for all of these building took me across the whole city on foot, walking up the hill from the silk factory converted to a youth hostel where i was living, through the church square where a giant ferris wheel was waiting for some tourists, to the market square with the red brick buildings, up stairs, down stairs. stopped over in my free time at the museums. the art museum where i found on the top floor an exhibition by photographer andreas gursky. his huge prints of the new landscapes of a globalised world were stunning. the architecture museum is where i discovered pancho guedes- portuguese architect building the most expressive modernism in mozambique.

st albans church in basel- where the youth hostel was

the rhein

but now to zurich where a long walk through the lovely old town and the lovelier lake took me to what turned out to be easily the best building i saw in switzerland- corbusier's dancing heidi weber pavilion.

corbusier by the way has also been commemorated on the 10 swiss franc note along with some images of chandigarh.

having seen what i had to i spent the rest of the day wandering on a tram through the city, taking all kinds of routes, getting off at random points walking through quiet neighbourhoods and the nice and crowded city center. also went and spent some time at the feet of the churches that form the skyline of the city and spent some time staring at the marc chagall stained glass windows in one of them.

i got back on saturday night to a house full of clothes. usha maushi's annual diwali sale was on at home. now i leave again on thursday for the andamans. that is for a holiday. the good life.

more photographs here