Switzerland

Have you ever imagined a place where the city is a short ride to the last known true village. A place where you can go from the lowest running water to the highest mountain and see homes scattered along the landscape. This was Switzerland. This trip was by far the best trip and the most beautiful place I have seen since traveling to Europe. The landscape was truly amazing and the way the residents have adapted is incredible. While in Switzerland we got to spend a night in Vrin, the last remaining village in Switzerland (so the tour guide said) and the next night we were in Zurich, the capital city.

The first day we arrived in Zurich where we were greeted by a bus that stayed with us the entire time. A luxury that we don't normally get but due to the lack of public transportation I guess this was the only option which was fine by everyone. We first traveled to the SwissRe conference center. The SwissRe is a company that insures other insurances. You can imagine the types of numbers this place is dealing with and the new conference building showed it.

After touring the SwissRe we traveled to Bregenz, Austria (right over the border) to see the Art Museum there designed by Peter Zumthor. There were some very odd exhibitions here but extremely interesting. The building is what we were really there to see which was very interesting as well. There is a very complex building envelope system with translucent glass panels and a simple concrete construction interior. The often call this building "the ghost" Here is a picture which will show you why.

Kunsthaus Museum, Bregenz Austria by Peter Zumthor

The first night of our Swiss travels we stayed in Hotel Sportcenter Funf-Dorfer. Our professor called this "industrial and odd, but convenient" which scared us a little but the hotel was actually very nice and comfortable.

8:30am came along so we checked out and headed to Chur to begin day 2. We first made a short stop to see a new addition to a building which was an entrance, appropriate because our project here is an addition to an old building. Our first real tour of the day was the School in Paspels, a small town area with an extremely interesting school building built on the landscape. Not a typical looking school for anything in the Boston area but it works for a small community and is very well known.

Paspels School

Chur, Switzerland

Now on to the highlight of the entire Switzerland trip. We moved on to Vals, home of the thermals Bath designed by Peter Zumthor. We began our experience of the building not actually there, but at the stone quarry where the stone was derived from to construct the very famous baths. The stone from this quarry is pretty well known and very expensive, we were lucky enough to tour the facility where the stone of cut from a block, to a variation of shapes and sizes to be used commercially or residentially. This facility ships they're stone around the world and had been used in many well known projects. Here are some images from the quarry and the Baths. I apologize for the lack of images from the Baths but cameras were prohibited, so I snuck a couple from outside.

Facility at the Vals stone quarry.

View from Vals Thermal Baths

Exterior Thermal Baths by Peter Zumthor

Sneaky shot of the exterior spa at Thermal Baths

Again, Exterior Spa 

From the Baths in Vals we then traveled to Vrin, the village I had mentioned that is said the be the very last in Switzerland. Needless to say this was a VERY small village, extremely rural and self sustainable. We stayed in the Hotel Pez Terri, where the 20 of us stayed in one room. This was well.... interesting. Me and a few other guys went to the Hotel bar, which happened to be the village bar as well I'm sure. This was a funny and relaxing night just hanging out. Much of the group read books, played cards...well im glad I have a few people here who know that they're books aren't going anywhere but the experiences are. Here are some images of the hotel and village by night.

View of Vrin from the hotel porch

Vrin, Switzerland- Hotel Pez Terri

Vrin Home

Village of Vrin

The next day we toured around Vrin  where we studied the designs, buildings, and ideas of Gion Caminda. A low key architect who is native to this town and trying to preserve this culture and economy through his works. The town thrives by keeping its work and materials within the people who call this home. Caminadas works have actually brought a few more members back into the society to further help it flourish. This small village lives off of its own livestock and has recently been benefiting due to this new importance of "organic meat" They have been producing more than they need to eat, therefore can sell the meat at insanely high prices which also helps the economics of the village greatly. Here are some images from the day as we toured around Vrin

Touring

Vrin Chapel

Village View

Me on the left...cliffside!

traditional building style

Mountain Shed

View from the hotel room

From Vrin we went back to where we started in Zurich. We stayed in the Hotel Limmathof which was very centrally located. I spent the night with my camera by the river, eating dinner, and just exploring the city as much as i could in one night. Not too many stories from this night as our professors gave up the rest of the day and night off for personal use. We just pretty much walked around, enjoyed a couple of beers with some friends, and rested up after our long day of walking some pretty mountainous landscapes. Here are some images from Zurich.

Zürich night shot

Zürich night shot

The final day found us checking out early and bussing to our final few sights. We toured another very nice school in Basel called the FH Sihlhof designed by Giuliani Honger.


From the school we continued to our very last tour which was more like a day or even a week packed in one. We actually crossed back into the very southern border of Germany. Here we reached an extremely interesting company campus. Apparently this CEO has a few bucks to throw around. So instead of collecting cars, homes, or other luxury items....he likes to collect architecture. So what he did was to gradually hire the worlds top architecture to each design a building for the campus. Our professor called this campus a "firework display of architecture" and that was actually very accurate. Here we saw the Vitra Design Museum by Frank Gehry, the campus fire station designed by Zaha Hadid, a conference center by Tadao Ando and a building which was just completed by Herzog and de Meuron. Here are some images from the day and the various building among this "collection"

Frank Gehry

Tadao Ando

Zaha Hadid

Bucky Fuller

Herzog & De Meuron

So our trip to Switzerland has come to an end unfortunately. This was like i said before my favorite trip by far so far. Here is a plane view as we depart back to Berlin.

Wing seat on Berlin Air

Im am now looking forward to Nice/Monaco in France next thursday, as well is our grand Italian tour in a few weeks which marks the end of our trip. Im am so excited for these next few weeks and hope that they will be even better than Switzerland. We have finished our designs for our projects and have began the comprehensive design portion which consists of developing drawing that could be handed to a contractor. We will need to consider every little detail of our design as well of functionality of our building addition. This is very new to us but also very interesting and exciting. ( i thought i should add a LITTLE bit of school info in here somewhere haha) Off to do some AutoCad now.

Ciao,

John