We travelled by train from Zurich to the French provincial city of Metz on a cold Monday morning in late January forewarned with knowledge that the journey might not be easy. We couldn’t buy a ticket beyond Luxemburg which meant a quick sprint to a ticket office to buy new ones in order to meet the tight connection. An inefficiency that felt out of character for the Swiss, a little absurd the ticket officer agreed with me but resigned to matters outside his control, to make matters worse the train stopped mysteriously outside of Luxemburg for several minutes adding to a growing sense of anxiety. Up until this moment we had been both amused by the precise nature of the Swiss Railways and alarmed at its steep cost; a day trip to Bern for example took about an hour on the train and cost three hundred dollars for two.
We crept out of town, gliding past the shiny corporate offices surrounding Zurich’s station then humming by factories with unfamiliar brand names and the low lying, drab suburban towns, depressing in any society, melancholic places which would make anyone question their existence. Paradoxically the more prosperous the suburbs the more vacuous they feel, the new cars and spotless buildings, the lack of vandalism and trash making it less rather than more human, the dispiriting newness and cleanliness of it all, I had to stop looking, to stop imagining the ponderous lives within those boxes.
Travelling by train in Switzerland is clearly a serious business, not the nostalgic, sometimes charming (and regularly frustrating) experience found in most places in the world. I sensed an air of purpose in the other passengers, laptop cases, business casual attire and, for a fleeting moment, I felt a pang of jealousy until I remembered the code napoleon and all the expert-comptables at the core of their bureaucracy, it was soon forgotten. If we felt the need to speak, we did so in whispers, it all felt very professional and hushed for just a train journey and I was a little embarrassed by the bags we had managed to accumulate and store amateurishly, luggage that had started the journey in Philadelphia as regulation Carry Ons but had now mysteriously grown to include several plastic shopping bags marking out our role as undisciplined tourists.
It’s a strange landscape between Switzerland and South Eastern France. Largely flat and industrialized, on the surface it has little going for it other than its location in the very physical center of Europe sitting on the vulnerable edges of Germany, Luxemburg and France. I guessed that many of these self-important people on the train were civil servants going onto meetings in Luxemburg, Strasburg or Metz, places regularly fought over, changing hands for centuries with alarming fluidity; traded in deals, absorbed by wars now uncomfortably sitting on or close to the borders of their aggressors. Borders that still exist I suspect now more to provide tax domiciles for companies and individuals than to define the region by its various historical cultural identities.
Metz isn’t the obvious place to vacation in late January. It is a handsome rather than beautiful city, it has several crown jewels including the cathedral with its extraordinary stained glass and the winding streets of the old town all of which was surely worth fighting for. One senses humor in its character, or a detached irony, surely necessary for a place that has changed hands between Rome, Germany and France, a little like the detachment that you sometimes find in orphaned children who had travelled between surrogate parents, a coping mechanism that deals with life but without excessive passion or optimism. France apparently recognizes this and to boost its confidence has both expanded its admirably cared for, sometime grand, administrative offices and its culture presence thanks to the outpost of the Pompidou Center build in 2010 by the architect’s Shigeru Ban and Jean de Gastines. We are here partly to see this museum and the happy coincidence of a Maurizio Cattelan show. The main reason however was to stay at a new hotel designed by Philippe Stark called Maison Heler which is a drab nine story block having the surreal addition of a typical nineteenth century house on its roof, I had read about it and wanted to see it myself.
Stark occupies an unusual position in the design world. Finding his stride in the 1980’s was a fruitful time in this sector of the arts, design coming late to post modernism, about two decades on the heels of literature, art, dance and architecture. Its oversimplistic to state that post-modern design had a fixed start date, even lazier to claim that the December 1980 meeting hosted by Ettore Sottsass and Barbara Radie, inviting several of their colleagues to form a collective named Memphis, was its birthplace. Never the less the products when shown at the Milan Fair was a moment of anarchy in a formal and dry world that needed an injection of fun and frivolity, challenging our notions of good taste. Modernism was slick, minimal and functional, technically advanced but cold. A new group of designers which included the members of Memphis as well as Ron Arad, in the UK and Philippe Starck in France began to seen, argued about and sometimes ridiculed by the press. It was thrilling to see the hand of the designers in the work, the weld marks, the improvisation and imperfections, reminded us that great design is not an outcome of flawless manufacturing but something more vital and urgent; by participating in it, supporting it, owning thoughtfully constructed objects you become part of a cultural moment, you choose to have a stake in our civilization. I was one of the handful of fans who would hang around Arad’s Neal Street studio in the early 1980’s on a Sunday evening to watch generic products like lamps and turntables being deconstructed and then remade with poured concrete, absolutely fascinated by what I was seeing.
Some of the derision was justified. Designers from the very beginning have claimed to want their work to be inexpensive, simple and enjoyed by everyone, a mantra heard in the corridors of the Bauhaus, in the cottage industries of William Morris, in the boardroom of Habitat and is one of the avowed aims of Starck who claims the term “democratic” design. It’s laughable, in almost all cases there is (and perhaps should be) a premium for quality design and arguably only a few businesses have occasionally come close to this ideal such as Muji and IKEA. When Arad was making his revolutionary work it was unaffordable, it was much later in life when I could actually own it. A young designer today might look at the products made in the 1980’s as being vulgar and ridiculous, there is a return to the ideals of modernism, or at least rational design frequently seen through the lens of sustainability.
Starck has continued his creative journey working on the fringes of interior decoration, industrial design, applied and contemporary art and even literature. His is a restless spirit valuing creativity above all, constantly crossing the boundaries of design disciplines. The hotel in Metz is apparently based upon a novel he had written about a young imaginative boy whose life was transformed when the monolithic hotel structure rose from the earth and lifted his home onto the roof. Absurdity or poetry? The hotel carries on this fiction, decorated with examples of the young creative Manfred Heler’s inventions, photographs which were in fact taken from the center for scientific research in Paris and models of his imaginary experiments. It’s easy to dismiss this all as nonscience until you witness the quality of the execution and the sincerity behind it. The details are everything, both God and the Devil are in them, they add up in this instance to an unmistakable work of conceptual art, one that can be occupied and which functions effectively, it was reassuring for example to see the restaurant spaces occupied and being busy and enjoyed. If he is guilty of anything it is his overt displays of wit, charm, engineering skill and elegance, distinctly French characteristics, that seems to run through anything he touches, from yacht design, to architecture, motorcycles and the best known household furniture and products he places his stamp on. We had a civilized dinner in his restaurant on our first evening, local food and wine from Lorriane, happy to see other guests who had dressed for the occasion despite the cold winter’s night, living comfortably within this piece of modern surrealism.
After a few days we took the train to Cologne, staying in a former Nunery. The further north we travelled the more disruptive and free the people seemed to become. By the time we reached Bonn it was almost refreshingly unruly on the train and when I heard a deranged homeless man scream in the station, his voice harrowing in the echoing hallways, I almost wanted to shout back in encouragement, such was the relief to be out of the perfection of Switzerland and bourgeoise France. When left the station under the crushing presence of the cathedral it felt like being at home rather than a foreign country, the urbanity of Cologne has echoes of New York and London while keeping its own cultural history alive.
We chose traditional eating houses many of which were linked to breweries when we dined out and I relished the familiar heartiness of the German cuisine. We then drove with Mary’s long term friend Claudia down to the Eifel region where her family keeps a cabin in the woods. Here I spend my time feeding the woodburning stove and watching the two friends (“like a Lord” I was reminded of from time to time) but in truth helpless in the face of such domestic competence. Some of the time reflecting on the nature of long term friendships and regret at those of my own that I had lost touch with or let down. At others times watching the chaos of birds at the feeder at the window, swooping and swerving, moments of consideration for others of their species and the occasional malevolent appearance of a much larger woodpecker aware of its clear superiority.
On the return to Cologne several days later we took a detour to visit an architectural wonder that Claudia wanted to show us. There was a family connection that I didn’t completely follow but the jist was that a highly religious female distant relative wanted a place to pray in the countryside. The commission was won by the Swiss architect Peter Zumther whose creation, known as the Bruder Klaus Feldkepelle, was a collaborative project with local farmers and members of the community. It required 112 trees to be placed together in the shape of a wig-wam, then a brutalist structure was formed by pouring concrete over the it before setting the tree’s alight. This created a burned core which allowed light in from the top and exposed the tree’s charred outline. The structure was remarkable to walk into, rough and still blackened, some claim it still smells of burnt wood, water had formed a pool from the opening and the light rested on the stone work in places forcing you to contemplate periodically the sometimes course beauty of nature. We saw it on a perfect day, wet and opaque, a wide tonality of green and grey, a landscape of occasional lonely tree’s friendless and bare, if you ever felt the need to get close to your God, this might be a good place to do so.
jnmanson 