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This is our last day in Basel, Switzerland, and it's been quite an adventure. After the hustle of group travel in Spain, it was nice to have some down-time and see things on a more relaxed schedule.
Becky, Shandra, and I took the train up from Granada, and had two long days of travel Saturday and Sunday. We spent the first couple of days of the week relaxing and exploring the old section of Basel.
We also took a day to go out and visit the Vitra chair factory and design campus, seeing several buildings by major architects, and the Le Corbusier museum. The day started out fairly normally, the three of us took a tram out to see the exterior of Foundation Beyler, designed by Renzo Piano. Then, the high Swiss prices seemed to have some relation to the discovery that we all now had deep pockets and short arms, and the three of us decided to walk to Vitra rather than take the bus, as it didn't look too far on the map. Almost an hour later, we had crossed from Swiss countryside to German countryside, and we arrived at Vitra just barely in time to catch the tour of the campus. The museum is held in a curving white building designed by Frank Gehry (with a black roof highly populated by pigeons). A small geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller (better known as a Bucky Dome), two factory buildings, and a small gas station also populated the campus, as well as a fire station turned art gallery designed by Zaha Hadid, and a conference building designed by Tadao Ando (one of my favorite architects).
The next day we wandered the city, seeing the more significant architecture projects, including many by architects Hertzog and de Meuron, as their firm hails from the city of Basel. We also chose to go in the Tinguely Museum. The museum not only holds major pieces by mobile junk sculptor Jean Tinguely, but photography and art from friends and contemporaries of Tinguely. The museum was probably one of my favorite from the whole trip, and certainly one of the best designed. The spaces flowed easily from one to the next, leaving no dead ends, and allowing the visitor to experience the moving junk sculptures to the fullest extent.
We took the morning today to go see the inside of Foundation Beyler, and it was well worth it. We got to see quite a bit of famous art from Impressionist to Pop, including several paintings by Van Gogh, Monet, Picasso, Matisse, Liechtenstein, and Andy Warhol. The museum was also nicely laid out, and several of the larger galleries had panels that lifted up and allowed the walls to be moved around.
We finished for the day and went to the train station to catch our train to Zurich, where we are connecting to Munich for the night before going to see Neuschwanstein tomorrow morning.
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