Posts about architecture

  • Toni-Areal, Zurich

    I am rarely in Zurich and I prefer the countryside and mountains to cities these days. But I like to be in the midst of industrial architecture sometimes, and one of my favourite sites is the former milk processing plant in the industrial area of Pfingstweid. Mainly because of the huge corkscrew ramp leading up to…

  • The Southbank Centre has long been one of the places to which I return when in London, thanks to a proliferation of arts venues, large spaces free of traffic, plenty of street performers, and a wide range of nooks, crannies, corners and walls in which light – both natural and artificial – are constantly changing. Although…

  • Jo and I split our journey to Franconia in southern Germany with a stop-over in Stuttgart. As we’d time to kill whilst there, we looked up some of the sights in advance and decided to stop off briefly at one of the centres of German engineering: the Porsche district. Alongside the obligatorily huge showroom of…

  • The number eleven has a lot of relevance in the Swiss city of Solothurn.

  • A recent blog post by a fellow Brit resident in Switzerland prompted me to head out into Bern. My goal for the lunchtime trip was a university building to the north of the railway tracks; a blue-painted building in the style common throughout the city, which dates to the end of the nineteenth century and…

  • Casino Kursaal, Interlaken

    The historic Casino Kursaal conference and event centre is one of the must-see stops on a tourist day in Interlaken. The gardens are beautiful and full of bright green lawns and well-tended flowers, with fountains in front of the “Jugendstil” building which must draw hundreds of tourists for a photo opportunity every day. Since 1st…

  • I was lucky enough to be able to arrange a trip to an iconic London landmark through a contact I made at a media conference in 2008.