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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27^th June. I had been looking forward to Basle, in fact I had rushed there to see projects by SAANA, Markali, Botta to name but a few, yet in the end I had time to see a fraction.  Skirting the city entirely, I first completed a tour of the Vitra Design museum in neighbouring Veil am Rhine before crossing the Swiss border to Riehen and the Beyeler Foundation, but even this was too much for one day.

Vitra was built up by Willi Fehlbaum who having fallen in love with the Eames’ furniture while on holiday in America, decided to bring it to Europe.  And indeed he did.  By 1967, they were manufacturing their own originals, and began to assume a position at the forefront of the art.  A change of direction and leadership came after a fire virtually destroyed the original plant in 1981.  Ralf Fehlbaum, the son of Willi, began to take over and rebuild Vitra with a series of ambitious architectural commissions.  His first move was to recruit Grimshaw Associates and a soon after, Frank Gherry.  Vitra now boasts buildings from Ando, Siza, Hadid, and before the year is out, SAANA and Basle’s own Herzog and de Mouron.  Despite all of the museum like features, it is still a working factory and also the headquarters of the companies operations, but one in which a conspicuous designeryness, pervades.  Everything is on display here, even the rough and ready – it is interesting to consider that Vitra, the company and the name finds its origin in ‘vitrine’, an object in which to display an object.

While waiting for the tour I walked around the museum, one of the buildings built by Gehry.  It was showing an impressive collection from the São Paulo partnership, the Campania Brothers – the highlight being an organic knot of velvety green, inspired by the virility and flora of the Amazon.  The building itself is both dynamic and practical.  Stylistically it inherits something from the alpine churches, whose tall white spires pierce the landscape in the surrounding area, yet particularly inside, it is unmistakably Californian.  A number of monolithic walls seem to act more as frames than as structure, painted white and composed in a sculptorly manner they carve out a variety of spaces, each with different lighting conditions and many nooks for individual displays.  Most impressive is the skylight, a cruciform that hovers over the main hall.  Like everything else in the building, it is achieved in a complex fashion.  The cruciform extends down deep into the hall, its sides extruded at different angles and lengths through the ceiling which is lost in shadow against the incoming light.  It may be a signature architecture but it is spatially intriguing and not without human touch.

Across a grassy swathe and amongst an orchard of cherry trees sits a very different building, a conference centre by Ando.  At first Ando was reluctant to accept the project, on the grounds ‘he was unfamiliar with the European mindset’.  In the end it was the cherry trees that swayed him more than anything and he got to build in his own way, with his back turned on the rest of the Vitra compound, for the building is all about escape, forward looking and concentration.  A path leads east and away, wide enough only for a single person it winds its way in a most geometric fashion along a line of cherry trees, and finally turns a corner behind a three meter wall enclosing the orchard.  You leave everything behind, a few more moments to straighten yourself out and then you enter, perhaps making greetings, taking off your jacket, already mentally prepared for business

The form is abstract, platonic even, two long rectangular plans meet off axis at a circular drum in the centre which links the two and also the entrance level with the floor cut out below.  Ando is playing a number of compositional games, walls never quite meet and light enters between gaps where ceiling hover, one is also sure proportioning systems are engaged, the repletion of the signature shutter pattern clearly demarks this.  But it is all enacted with a robust and securing palate of materials, heavy masonry, black ironwork and wood.  This is certainly a building comfortable with intensity and intellect.

As I left I noticed a blemish in the concrete.  Ando is famous for his finish, his shuttering boards are designed with six fixings when only four are necessary.  He even punched a foreman for failing to clean his shutters before a pour, presumably pretty hard as he used to be a boxer.  It is fitting then that this little scar was a perfect imprint of a spring cherry leaf, petrified forever – a reminder of renewal when the orchard is bear and icy.

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26^th June.  I woke in a forest just to the south of Koblenz, below one of the many forts that line the Rhine in this steep and picturesque stretch, the Mittelrhein.  I drove for a short while to Saint Goar, where a fellow motorcyclist who admired my “big motor” very kindly gave me a bottle of Riesling, the grapes picked and prepared in the village which we stood.  I then crossed the river by ferry just a little downstream of the Lorelei, or murmuring rock, which rises shear to the height of some hundred and twenty meters.  It is also the narrowest point of the river between Switzerland and the North Sea.  You can see it in Turners accompanying watercolour above.  There is a boat in the foreground navigating the treacherous rapids whose jagged river bed has wrecked many a vessel.

Then came Pfalzgrafenstein, a toll-fort built on an island mid-river.  It served to extract higher taxes from the river traffic, against the wishes of many important people including the pope who threatened the baron who built it with excommunication in the early 14^th century.  It too was rendered by Turner but his impression is quite impossible to match with the single and fixed point of a camera.

I had first been attracted to the location by Britain’s most celebrated painter, through an exhibition catalogue, ‘Turner in Germany’, by Cecilia Powell.  A leading authority on Turner, I was fortunate enough to meet her in Tate Britain some years ago where she introduced me to a collection of Turner’s Venetian scenes.  A fantastic series of works on paper with hallucinatory colouring and wobbling reflections quite unlike anything I had seen before.  Although her knowledge and passion where unmistakable, at the time I was blissfully unaware of who she was.

It was exciting to drive through the country I had seen in the parallel world of paint, navigating the narrow roads squashed between the gorge side and the Rhine which Turner had walked and drawn.  As I ate my supper in Koblenz, looking onto Ehrenbreitstein, caught in the last of the evening light, I could not help but think of the old master.  He produced a great number of studies of the castle not only for its majesty, but also because he was on assignment; illustrating Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.  And so I will leave you a fitting verse:

Here Ehrenbreitstein, with her shattered wall
Black with the miner’s blast, upon her height
Yet shows of what she was, when shell and ball
Rebounding idly on her strength did light;
A tower of victory! from whence the flight
Of baffled foes was watch’d along the plain:
But Peace destroy’d what War could never blight,
And laid those proud roofs bare to Summer’s rain–
On which the iron shower for years had pour’d in vain.
(Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto III, v.58)

Please be aware Ehrenbreitstein was partially dismantled and dynamited by the French during the Napoleonic wars as they withdrew in truce not as they attacked.

You can find Cecilia Powell’s ‘Turner in Germany’ on Amazon amongst other online bookshops and if your local book shop doesn’t stock it they should certainly be able to oder it in.

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