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Yverdon-les-Baines, Switzerland
These are the days of miracle and wonder and don't cry baby don't cry, don't cry
Once a generation, the fine and wealthy people of Switzerland create a national exposition, a snap shot of Swiss life, Swiss hopes, Swiss dreams. Up until October 20 of this year, the Swiss National Exposition (expo.02) ran at four permanent and one temporary site (which they insisted on calling arteplages) in and around two different lakes in the western and decidedly French part of the country. What drew me to this exposition and (in many ways) sparked the entire trip was not a snap shot of Swiss life, Swiss hopes, Swiss dreams but instead this- American architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio and their neo-legendary and just inherently cool Blur Building.
Projecting out into Lake Neuchatel from the small (enough) town of Yverdon-les-Baines, visitors walk right into, through and above what could best be described as a creepy, unnatural cloud suspended on the lake. There were no exhibits inside, nothing to make you stop and think, just the structure itself. Its only purpose (as far as I could tell) was to explain to the hopeful Swiss once and for all that clouds are not happy and fluffy but instead painfully cold, wet and disorientating.
Before you enter, visitors are offered the chance to purchase a small plastic poncho, at 3 Swiss Francs a good value for the journey ahead. Those who chose to brave the white, fluffy cloud without such conveniences were the ones impatiently pushing people out of the way so that they could get out of the damn thing and dry off.
The cloud itself was formed by thousands and thousands of small nozzles attached to the frame structure, in and around you at every turn and every level as you bravely passed through it blurry heart.
If you are lucky enough to find your way across the ramp and up the stairs, and fortunate enough to visit the arteplage under ideal weather conditions, you will eventually find yourself at a viewing platform right above the clouds, where you can wait as long as you want before taking a deep breath and descending back into the blur.
I visited the Blur Building within its last week of true existence and part of me is quite sad to know that I will never be able to do it again, of what was and will never be. Sure, my visit was just like being in a great, artificial fog with a lot of Swiss people, but it also meant something more, something deeper which is kind of hard to explain. It was almost like realizing how rare that moment in time was, how the cloud always looked different, was constantly changing. Every second there was unique, the result of too many uncoordinated factors to ever be (with surety) again. Plus it looked cool
Two train rides and a lake away from Yverdon-les-Baines, the arteplage at Murten had its big time architectural draw as well. French architect Jean Nouvel created a great big cube in the lake, guarded by an inaccurate clock (it was late afternoon at the time) and a lifeguard with possibly the most boring job on earth. As for the cube itself, there was an exhibit of some type involving a short boat ride but it was closed by the time I got there, yet again I was a victim of Swiss trains and their undeniably true, always late nature.
From Lausanne you can go anywhere. Perched on the shore of Lake Geneva, you are only four hours from Paris by TGV, three and a half hours from Milan by Cisalpino, an hour away from Bern or Geneva, another hour to Zurich or Basel and the German frontier, and only a half hour away from any of the better arteplages. I had been to Lausanne before, a vertical city unlike any other and remember my time most for an unbelievably spectacular stretch of track on the Bern route, just ten minutes before Lausanne. Vineyards hang impossibly above the perfect lake as the distant mountains of Evian (France) look close enough to touch. The highlight of this visit was to find me taking a local train and getting off at these vineyards, wandering through this paradise toward the lake, toward Lausanne, toward an untold destiny. This was not to be, a persistent cold and windy storm kept me in town, killing time at the Olympic Museum and the windswept waterfront as I waited for a TGV to drier ground. While part of me is sad about what never was, the rest of me fully realizes that from Lausanne I can go anywhere, that it is only a matter of time before I meet these vineyards and this untold destiny.
The night before the storm, the old town of Lausanne doesn't look especially worried- its small squares and fountains remaining just as quaint as ever.
No one wandering the dangerous, trolley ridden pedestrian streets of Bern seem especially concerned about the intentions of a looming, massive clock just behind them.
A slightly safer distance from that clock, the streets of Bern reveal their true self. Stone streets, endless covered sidewalk arcades and four story buildings that look suspiciously alike, all framing the occasional memorial to some Swiss guy, stretch off in every imaginable direction.
