We walked along the sea front at Aldeburgh enjoying the miscellaneous brightly coloured architecture and the huts selling smoked fish, the bandstand and some of the ornamental lettering:-
Monthly Archives: June 2015
Snape
We went to two concerts at the Maltings, both by the Monteverdi Choir with John Eliot Gardiner conducting and Isabelle Faust playing the solo violin – a mixture of partitas and choral works, more like a church service than a concert. In the second concert particularly, Isabelle Faust gave an astonishing virtuoso performance of two Bach sonatas for solo violin (Nos. 2 and 3), helped by playing a Stradivarius and the resonant acoustic of the great barn.
In the interval a rainbow appeared over the marsh:-
Street Design (1)
I have become interested in the issue of street design because of the forthcoming redesign of, first, Savile Row and then Cork Street and, one day I hope, Burlington Gardens. In London, the design of the street is the province of the traffic engineer, creating diagrams of effective circulation, based normally on tarmac. But in Basel, Lampugnani has experimented with a more classical order, low pavements so that they are not too obviously differentiated from the design of the street (and good for wheelchairs too), and good use of materials (Sardinian granite). I asked what the literature is on street design. Apparently it’s mostly nineteenth century.
Novartis
This afternoon I went on a tour of Novartis, the pharmaceutical company, with Jörg Schwarzburg who worked with Vittorio Lampugnani on laying out its masterplan. Lampugnani was recruited in 2001. He kept the main street as the central axis, basing it on the original Celtic settlement and adding a flanking Milanese arcade. First building on the left is by Roger Diener with coloured glass panels on the façade (the chemical industry was founded on Basel’s historical expertise in dyes), on the right a building by SANAA. In the middle of the site there’s a building by Frank Gehry which disrupts the rigid geometry of the site. David Chipperfield has done an austerely classical building in which he mixes the offices and the laboratories. At the end, there’s a building by Tadeo Ando. It’s an architect’s dream of systematic order, utopian like a design by Aldo Rossi. No photography.
St. Antonius Church
I luckily read in the guidebook about St. Antonius (thank you Wallpaper guide), a remarkable piece of proto-brutalism, all in raw concrete, designed by Karl Moser and Gustav Doppler in 1927 and apparently known as the ‘Soul Silo’. I went on a pilgrimage by tram:-
Basel Architecture
Basel is a good city for architecture, taking its civic responsibilities seriously, now as always in the past. Here are some things I saw.
The Münster:-
The entrance to the Natural History Museum:-
Basel Art Fair (2)
Spending a few days at the Basel Art Fair, not having ever been before, has made me realise its central significance in the calendar of contemporary art. It’s not so much the Fair itself – after all it’s possible to see a large amount of contemporary art in downtown New York and now in central London, often in much better and less hectic circumstances – but the sense of collective endeavour, the renewal of essentially Calvinist vows over many years. So many of the people I have met have been here every year for the last two decades at least (the first fair opened in June 1970). It’s a ritual , but an important one, because contemporary art and contemporary architecture are more central to the culture of Basel than elsewhere.
Museum der Kulturen
Owing to the temporary closure of the Kunstmuseum while it is being renovated, key works have been redistributed to other museums, including some of the greatest works by Holbein which have been redisplayed in a single tall room in the nearly unvisited Museum der Kulturen, including his Dead Christ dated (very conspicuously) 1521:-
Basel
Basel is pretty low key for a major art, financial and pharmaceutical city, low rise and much of it is suburban like a large industrial park with smoking chimneys in the distance and the headquarters of Roche right near the centre of town. I got a better sense of it on day two, having entirely missed the historic centre which is extensive and well preserved. It’s a burgher town, grown rich on the banks of the Rhine with old houses and quiet streets:-
Schaulager
We set off to see the Schaulager, one of Basel’s multiple museums, designed, like so much else in Basel, by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron for the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation and opened in 2003. It’s not the most beautiful building, a big brown biscuit on three sides, like a Weetabix, with an entrance façade with two large video screens:-
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