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Basel, Switzerland
I'm the boy that's crossing borders, I'm the boy with social disorders, I'm the boy with restraining orders
Basel is a city unlike any other, although I guess that could be said about any city anywhere when you get right down to it. What makes Basel unique starts with its location- it's in Switzerland but within short walking distance of France and Germany, standing on the (literal) edge of all three countries and cultures. It is also an unexpected center of design and architecture, a place where even the tough sounding Basel Bad Bahnhof (pictured here) wouldn't feel right unless it also had a disco ball hovering above.
Complimentary with your Basel hotel reservation is a free pass for local public transportation, a real value if (like me) you want to take the number 2 tram out of Basel SBB (the Swiss railway station) and way out to the very, very edge of town to see the Beyeler Fondation. The Foundation (or perhaps I mean Fondation) is a small contemporary and modern art museum designed by Renzo Piano in a style not all that dissimilar from Renzo Piano museums in Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Dallas and Houston, among other places (of those the one in Dallas is my favorite). And for a small contemporary and modern art museum it had a pretty strong collection, enough good work to make the long tram ride out feel well worth the trouble.
Pictured (on the left) is "Split Rocker," a sculpture by Jeff Koons on the grounds of the Fondation (or perhaps I mean Foundation). The sculpture, a giant flowery disembodied head of a rocking horse, doesn't seem to concern the tiny people at the cafe nearly as much as it probably should.
Welcome to Vitra, just over the border in Germany. Vitra is a furniture manufacturer (they were the initial European distributors of the Eames chairs) and when their headquarters campus suffered a fire in the early 1980s, they chose to rebuild with design in mind. The campus has buildings by Nicholas Grimshaw, Alvaro Siza, SANAA, Zaha Hadid and Tadao Ando, among others. The campus also has a public face starting with this, an early, pre-CATIA and pre-titanium museum designed by American (ok, technically Canadian) architect Frank Gehry. From the museum (which hosts small design shows), Vitra also offers architectural tours in German and English, a chance to go behind the gates and see all of that killer architecture up close and personal.
Basel is home to Herzog and de Meuron, a famous architectural firm that British architect Will Alsop once famously called Hedgehog and the Moron. Regardless of whether or not you agree, you still just have to love Alsop for that. And while time may have been unkind to Alsop (law suits, cancelled buildings, fading promise), Herzog and de Meuron are building everywhere, especially all over their hometown. They also have (relatively) recently completed this building, VitraHaus, a showroom for Vitra that focuses on their residential products. Inside the extruded house pick-me-up-sticks, shapes intersect with cascading spaces that connect showrooms and take you from the top all the way down to a cafe and into a strange well of a courtyard.
There might be some interesting buildings by famous architects at Vitra, but the one building that everyone came to see is this, Zaha Hadid's Vitra Fire House. A totally impractical building with some really questionable detailing (it was her first built building after all), it was quickly repurposed from a fire house to, um, well nothing else really. Today it's a stop on the architectural tour but not really useful for any actual purpose. Despite its flaws, the iconic building can really be quite spectacular and it's easy to lose yourself to its charms as you walk past the swinging truck doors that never worked right or past the bathrooms that could only be described as disorientating. Fun.
