On September 28th, we left Solothurn around 10:30 in the morning, a later than normal departure, to travel to Basel, Switzerland. One of Frank Weiner's old architect friends, Emile, who has a small firm in Basel met us there to show us a few buildings around the city. One of the most interesting things we saw was actually a rehab facility by Herzog and DeMeuron in the outskirts of the city. It is a place for people with serious injuries that resulted in serious mental disorders and physical trauma to go through therapy. We were allowed only to walk around the building for the privacy of those being treated there. It was a really well done facility made mostly of wood; it follows their idea of a "skin" that wraps the building that is seen in most of their work. You can see fromthe outside the glass "bubbles" that create a skylight in each of the private rooms.
Photos of Herzog and DeMeuron's rehab facility and concrete building.
If we walked literally a few hundred yards away, we crossed the border into France to see another building by Herzog and DeMeuron. (Basel is right where Germany, France, and Switzerland all meet.) It was a concrete building screen printed with acid to create texture.
We then traveled to a Frank Gehry building still under construction and a pharmaceutical building with many different colored panes of glass covering the building. Basel is a home base for a number of pharmaceutical companies and also has a museum on the history of pharmaceuticals. (I unfortunately didn't have the opportunity to go... Sorry Mom!)
Photo of pharmaceutical building.
We spent the rest of the day wandering on our own and sketching after a full morning and early afternoon. After dinner at our hotel, we went to a cafe recommended by Lucy and Frank that has several layers of cellars created by the original city wall that you can go down into. It was like a mini museum with some of the history of the old city. There was also a wine cellar where they have tastings once a month. Upstairs, on the ground floor, a few of us had some coffee with one of the students studying architecture in Texas that were also staying in our hotel at the time. They are on a travel program for several months like the other group of students from Tech that are traveling around. It was nice to get to know them and hear about their architecture school and travels.
Photos from the cafe cellar.
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