Cheesy Deception in Gruyère

As a family we love cheese and all things Dairy. Gruyère -pretty little idyllic Swiss-French village that it is- is all about cheese and cream, and merited a minor pilgrimage from where we were staying on lake Geneva up into the alps. We arrived, had fondue, ate bowls of cream with berries, took pictures of the waitresses and tourist shop salespeople dressed up in variations of lederhosen, purchased a couple of keyring-sized swiss cowbells... and unexpectedly stumbled into a typically wild bar designed by Alien (the movie) set designer HR Giger.

Of all the places in the world he could have fallen in love with, he fell in love with picture-postcard, Heimat theme-park Gruyère, deciding that this all-smiling all-dancing hill top tourist mecca was to be the home of his significantly darker, mechanico-biological, violently pornographic, science fiction legacy. There is now a Giger museum near the apex of the village's High Street, and behind some medieval arched windows opposite lurks what looks like a vaulted room housing the museum's bar.

So from a town heavy on the cheese in every respect -from the food, to the camera snapping, to the nauseating cuteness of it all- you step into some full-on stage-set cheese Noir, beginning with the Pelvic-bone-and-spinal-column Umbrella rack.

Through the alien tables, giant swiveling spinal column chairs, spinal column vaulted ceiling, writhing and complaining wall of tiled babies etc etc. There is way too much of every element, with every square centimeter of the place taken up with one or another motif by the artist. Its wonderfully OTT.

It offers itself up to you with all the honesty of a good piece of horror-ride artifice, wearing the contradiction between its quite spectacular visual and lighting effects, and the crapness of the way its materials are all revealed to be light and hollow when you knock on them, very lightly and happily indeed.

It kind of redeemed Gruyere for me, because these cloyingly perfect towns were getting on my nerves a bit. They all seem to be taken-in by their own illusion, seeming to themselves believe the lie they peddle to visitors that they are somehow real and originally swiss, simply by virtue of their physical fabric being old (and usually this is a selective truth anyway, after certain 19C romantic remodelings).

Like St Paul de Vence in the Var, these tourist havens are quite violently pornographic in how they serve up, without context or content, narrative or depth, their limbs and ligaments, streets and facades, which hump away obediently and on cue in the background of family snapshots, smiling inanely like the beautiful old houses that they are, smiling the empty unhappy smile of someone getting fucked for money. This whole sad scenario is perpetuated by the incredible belief that it is precisely in amongst this industry of heritage exploitation, exactly in the middle of this terribly efficient engine of cultural annihilation, precisely in the empty hearts of places like Gruyere, with its "Artisanal" cheese and 15th century houses, devoid of economic independence and local life, that authenticity claims to be located.

And Giger, for me anyway, with his massively over the top interior slap bang in the heart of Authenticland, by virtue of ramping up the ridiculousness of his kitsch noir, acts as the perfect antidote to all the fake earnestness outside. The Giger bar doesn't pretend to be real but asks you to suspend your disbelief and enjoy its silliness and strangeness in a pact of knowing enjoyment; it is illusion. Gruyere and similar villages pretend to be real, and ask you to suspend your critical faculties and spend your euros in specificaly codified ways, in a pact of mutual exploitation; it is deception. The Giger bar brought this scenario out into sudden clarity and relief for me. It gives the truth to Gruyere's lie

Luxury in Lausanne

SANAA have done it. They've managed to produce a piece of pure, unadulterated luxury that looks and feels the very opposite of weighty lucre, in a region that expends such a significant proportion of its creative prowess in attempting to achieve exactly that, in the form of exclusive appendages that pretty much fail universally in embodying anything except their weight in gold, or platinum, or Moon-Dust, or Narwhal tusk...

Few things in our cities are more contentious, fought over, valued and hoarded than space. Few things can have such an immediate and direct effect on our quality of life, on the way we interact with each other in our free time, and indeed how we spend our free time; whether we are forced to huddle alone in our cupboard-homes pursuing solitary pastimes, expend our income on leisure activities that turn our free time into a source of consumptive production, or whether there are places where we can enjoy the pleasure of unprogrammed time enjoyed in our own manner, in a public space, surrounded by other people equally doing nothing, or working hard, as they will, together or alone, but in a contiguous space.

^Above is a short video of my sister-in-law being frogmarched by me around a little portion of the building, but here you can see a better video and some of the official spiel.


Parks are one kind of place that provide those sorts of conditions, being free for all to use how they wish, according to some simple rules of propriety. However, while they are usually full of possibilities for wandering, dozing, and playing sports, they do not provide the shelter or the positive means for engaging in activities of the more contemplative, intellectual sort, that are always so well catered for in the local or national Library.

There are Libraries IN parks (Milan, Buenos Aires), but until now I had not come across a park IN a library. We are all quite inured by now to the impotent visual spectacle of our Dubais, Westfields, Cheesegraters, and the tainted feeling of tawdry exclusivity which they attempt to drown us in, ocular euphemisms for the sinister structural imbalances we know they really embody. Walking into a marble-clad lobby, a shiny new inner-city mall, a vast be-travertined atrium doesn't feel special, does not make me feel good, it just feels frightening, it makes me feel watched, isolated, unwelcome, my behaviour must be correct, else guards appear out of nowhere and escort me and my arse out of there pronto.

Libraries have even stronger codes of behaviour, they just happen to fit my habits and opinions like a glove.  Its just that their order of mutual respect, and communal maintenance of the perfect environment for thought and study or drawing and writing, is just so much more meaningful and important than keeping people feeling safe so that they continue spending their money on pointless crap. Parks are more open in the range of behaviours they allow, since they have enough space -groups of people can form islands with enough distance from other islands to not disturb each other with their antics; but they are equally free of any obligation to buy, of any duty to be a functional economic unit, to have a direct purpose for being there. And that is a very valuable, and increasingly rare commodity these days: the ability to spend time in a shared space, outdoors or indoors, in which you are not obliged to be participating in any form of economic exchange; in which you do not have to be there for an explicit purpose; in which your presence is not a means to an end other than your presence itself.

So with the backdrop of libraries closing all over britain like those female ants-with-wings that like to die en-masse every spring, and with new public spaces in London (and elsewhere im sure, but im very provincial) either privately owned and watched over by private security who maintain the right clientele spectrum, or public but designed to discourage loitering through seats that you cant sit properly on (lean-to's), and ledges that you cant lie on, with that backdrop I walked into the Rolex Learning Centre, and it was like someone had dropped me through a wormhole into an impossible alternate reality.

SANAA have always been interested in parks and landscape, in the sense of a field for human interaction and activity, but here they have been allowed to turn the usual logic of building inside out, so that the circulation spaces outstrip the area of programmed space, to be used as occupants wish, wi-fi everywhere, bean-bags strewn throughout, the floor undulating all over the place, and pierced here and there with circular openings that let you look through to the vast grotto underneath. Its full of direct quotes from OMA's 1990 Agadir convention Centre competition entry, and builds on that office's thoughts surrounding the nature of the Library in the 21st century that were developed with the Seattle Public Library project, all pulled together here into the most spatially generous interior I have ever come across. In a way it could be seen as a bit of a No-Stop-City kind of infinitely extendable, totalising nightmare, where the natural and technological have completely converged to turn us into happy self-contained creative nomadic units, but then, in this form I find that much more desirable than having nowhere to go other than a bloody art gallery.

A vast interior landscape (the building's floor area is 37,000sqm), free for anyone to use and enter, to relax on the floor and chat in, attend lectures in, research in, or have dinner and listen to concerts in. A building where so much of the space is devoted to really nothing at all in particular... bean-bags at the ready. It cantilevers and bridges like mad, for no other reason than to simulate nature, stimulate your spatial awareness, and encourage your ability to occupy and enjoy awkward angles (there are lots of tables too). It is white and gray, and as a student of mine pointed out recently -devoid of texture. However that neutrality just brings into focus -almost didactically- the fact that this building provides in luxurious, fecund abundance, the kind of beautifully designed in-between, unprogrammed space, together with freely accessible learning facilities, that are either so etiolated in our cities, or already dying away. Despite all the attempts of new semi-public places like One New Change to appear welcoming, they are simply not, and cannot be by virtue not only of their design (with its nods to public access, viewing deck etc) but of their very raison d'être.

Walking around the Rolex Centre on a quiet afternoon, there was a studious, but relaxed and languid atmosphere. I wanted to stay, I felt welcome, I wanted to make my own corner with book, laptop, sketchbook and cup of tea, somewhere on one of the more out-of-the-way hills, and settle down to do-my-thing. In terms of how the building was experienced (separate to the official blurb and concept, they so often bear no relation to the actual completed building -as in Zaha and Eisenmann's aerial architectures) it brought together the distant sounds, walkers, and clustered picnics of Hampstead Heath with the respectful, sobre collection of concentrating individuals that is my experience of the British Library. Public building for the public, with access to services and public space to work and not work in, the fact that this (aside from the engineering theatrics) felt so totally unusual, luxury, unique, and exclusive (all the words that ring so hollow in adverts for luxury housing developments and boutiques) was, after I left, a deeply depressing thought; that the unusual and singular is no longer that which panders to wealth and exclusion and short-term economic gain, but that which includes, is blind to wealth, and focuses on developing long-term quality of life. As commercial spectacle has long since taken over, this, the undetermined public interior, has become the ultimate in luxury.

But then this building is not really open to just anyone, and it has a very clear, demographically specific economic purpose. It is tucked away, far from the centre of Lausanne on the university campus, where it took us quite a while to find it. It is a university institution first and foremost, a forward thinking and experimental one yes, but of a very specific context that can afford it, and feels safe in the knowledge that its openness is open to a very specific crowd. This building is an armature of the luxury business and bio-tech that the region fosters -it is a place so wealthy and homogenous that it can afford to develop a new place like this, seeing it as a specific investment in the 'intellectual capital' (and this is the international, wealthy demographic who filled the place) that maintains the country's high levels of industrial competitiveness. The feel good factor that I felt there was, like the copiously amenable corporate campuses in Silicon Valley, geared towards the optimisation of productivity of the students and researchers. But it still made me feel good.

Which is good planning. But why not for everyone? If only the state could again realise what certain academic institutions and corporate bodies (and everyone that Im acquainted with) know, namely that humans need more from their environment than to be shuttled from one place to another, constantly producing and consuming and competing and worrying and wanting and trying...

The following are some more images of the interior, which I visited on a sunday afternoon, hence its relative quietness, although there were still substantial amounts of people there, thinly scattered about...
oh, and below is a sort of internal funicular for wheelchairs that navigates one of the steeper areas.

Geneva's Time and Timelessness

Departures Hall

The old terminal of the city’s airport is an essay in well proportioned, precisely detailed, slick high modernism, of the sort that in any other country would either be so hidden by a grimy cake of ill considered additions, and a total lack of cosmetic maintenance, that its original virtues would be entirely submerged; or else would have been lovingly rediscovered, restored, and elevated to a higher plane of architectural existence by the status of historical idol-hood that is conferred on a building together with the ‘heritage’ budget for its restoration.

Facade of Main Terminal Building

Elsewhere the building would have been through several cycles, through which it would have suffered and been reborn, or at least seen itself be modified and altered repeatedly to accommodate evolving circumstances, the place would have been marked by time, but this building seems totally frozen at the moment of its inception, perfectly maintained on the cusp of the 1970s, unchanged except for a few television screens for displaying arrival times, that look as if they are from the 80s. It doesn’t have the totally contemporary bright-shiny-modernity of the renovated Royal Festival Hall (that impossibly idealised past newness, like aggressive plastic surgery), but is instead a slightly faded form in whose lack of lustre, but abundance of intact atmosphere, can be read a consideration and awareness of aging and decay that is far more consistent, perhaps frighteningly so (like embalming at birth) and far less sentimental than our fitful, and guilty, reconstructions of buildings raped by inconsideration. In this rigorously petrified architecture, which seems to deny time, there are endless parades of posters and advertisements for luxury watches, from the whole gamut of manufacturers in the area (you can see two in the right of the first photo) from Audemars Piguet to Baume et Mercier and Rolex.

Advertisment for a luxury watch in Geneva Airport

These adverts seem to cluster into three groups, those that draw lines of reassurance from the past into our present, and by implication into a comfortably recognisable future; those that assure timeless worth through the scarcity value of the materials from which they are constructed; and those that thrust with the confidence and bravura of jet-engines, or fast cars, into a positively exciting future. The designs follow suit, with the first type all looking like bizarrely overcomplicated Victorian scientific devices (usually with a hint to the nautical) that I would have thought only Hollywood, or Tim Burton, could conceive of; the second type forming themselves as miniature display cases designed to show off their burden of diamonds or even, as above, their weight of genuine moon dust; and the third uniformly composed of two ingredients -although at varying quantities, these being the angular implication of movement and speed taken from the silhouette of a stealth fighter, and the massive punch and carved strength taken from the jutting profile of a tank.

With all of these posters, and in the building itself, there is a distinct lack of the kind of novelty and newness which was so prevalent in the Heathrow that I had just left. Even the posters of futuristic looking watches looked terribly obvious, old somehow, completely without any forms that might surprise, even in the slightest way. They are all about circumventing time, whether by being sure of the future through your connection with the past, through the assurance of a ‘timeless’ quantitative value, or through the confidence of a masculine arrogance; and all perfectly framed within a building that seems to be a fulfilment of all their promises, a fossilized but living nexus, unchanged in all its main elements, cared for and maintained as if it were intrinsically valuable, and still looking to a bright future from back at the apogee of the modern traveller’s glamorous past.

Office building on the lake front

It was by parts thrilling and sad, I felt as if I were Donald Draper in MadMen visiting the city back in the day, bronze door handles, dapper suits and all, and the illusion only gets stronger if you are visiting as briefly as I did, and only have time for a momentary walk around the city, because its waterfront is clad in exquisitely maintained modern palaces from the same period, perfect boxes of Gordon Bunshaft slickness arrayed around the lake and the river as if they were counting down the days to their inception. Those buildings were thrilling, I could imagine the whole place like a little Florence of the 60s, but then accompanying these buildings wasn’t any art, decoration, invention or even glamour, just adverts and products like the kind below. Lots of little timelessnesses that can be melted down, and would either still hold their value, or be worth even more.