27^th June cont.  Renzo Piano was the first ‘star’ architect I really had any appreciation for.  I had visited Potsdamer Platz and the Pompidou Centre before I became architecturally aware and was moved by neither.  What I really fell in love with were his workshop, set above the cliffs outside Genoa and accessed by a glass elevator, and also his ocean going yacht.  Both consummately detailed, appearing like a part of heaven on earth, and so when I’d completed my first year of studies I went in search of as many of his buildings as I could, I even stopped in Genoa and rang up the office, asking in borrowed Italian if I could visit the workshop.  “No,” came the answer in English.  But it won’t be the last time I try.

The Beyeler Foundation has a right to be held among his finest works, perhaps even first.  It sits majestically on a little rise surrounded on three sides by parkland and protected farmland and on the entrance façade by the main road through Riehen.  This front is bounded by a substantial wall of the same deep maroon, (Patagonian) porphyry, a stone prized by Imperial Rome and even the Greeks.  It is used as an applied finish and no lie is made of this.  Each regularly shaped oblong (50cm x 25cm) is stacked directly over the previous.   Joints run unbroken across the entire length and height of the façade.  Yet it is not without a quality of stonelyness, the copings are dealt in chunky 8cm thick slabs spanning 3 blocks or 150cm, a key length in the arrangement of the plan.  Its texture and colour are quite memorising and combine with the landscaping to form a suitable shell for the rarefied and exotic collection within.  The entrance grades down to a little below street level, to the level of the pond.  A lily pond that laps outside the room built to house Monet’s most admired painting.  But when I visited it was hung in the first hall.  It had a wall to itself and there would have been little point putting anything else beside, infact for me there was almost no point in having anything else in the whole museum.  After an hour or so of staring into its galaxy of colours, which move perpetually across a curtain of deepest blue and purple, each area a dance of joyful abandon to rhythm, light and colour, I retreated to the garden for a pause before I could hope to make anything of Matisse, Picasso or even Cézanne.

Outside was glorious. The glass slates that levitate over the masonry appear to glow in the bright sun like the thinnest cut marble.   To the south cattle graze amongst cherry trees and the sound of their bells travels up to the ‘English Style Garden’.  Remind me to pay more attention to our gardens when I return for whatever inspired this must be truly fantastic.

Recuperated I returned and was very glad I did seeing much of the collection and also the Giacometti special, a huge assembly of Alberto’s most famous elongated figures but also and most interestingly a large collection of earlier works and also work by his family.  My favourites being a series of curious game like sculptures in wood, wrought iron and stone and some canvases of Alberto’s father, Giovanni, whose application of paint and staring self-portraits are incredibly intense and vital.

As I left there was a cacophony of sound erupting from loud speakers.  Across the road a rock festival was in full swing, fortunately and in credit to the buildings engineers there was never a hint of this inside.  And so I saddled up and headed for Austria crossing most of Switzerland in an obliterating rainstorm.

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