Architecture - 1

View of some of the hotels on Lake Lucerne in Lucerne town in Switzerland


I could spend the entire day during the trip just staring at the buildings. I was absolutely absorbed. There's enough to talk about, to span several blog entries, so here's the first.

Some of the perspectives:

(caveat: I'm interested enough in this stuff that I'm going to theorise and talk some stuff. With no training in architecture, I may be making a huge fool of myself, but I beg tolerance if so).

-so many beautiful old buildings that were carefully preserved in all the places. Europe has built up huge wealth over the years in the form of all the buildings they have. Somehow the same thing hasn't happened in India.
-- the monuments were one aspect of it, but as interesting was the architecture of normal buildings. The old cities all have a very consistent style of building through all the city which seems like quite a remarkable thing. Which brings up the question of how to blend modernity with the old. This is a glaringly obvious question because modern western steel and glass architecture is so different from older European architecture. At the same time, the Europeans themselves had (and have) many world famous modern architects so presumably they have been very actively struggling with this problem all along. Actually I didn't see many examples of this problem being solved very well. In Paris the pyramid in front of the Louvre is one example where they don't match well even though the pyramid is very cool in itself. The other thing in Paris is that they have a separate section of the city called La Defense where they have all the glass and steel skyscraper architecture. There's a similar thing in London too with the new Docklands area. This seems a reasonable solution. In some places, the newer buildings will maintain the same proportions and features of the older buildings, but be a lot more austere without any of the decorations and curlicues, and the effect is not very satisfactory. And in some cases we saw the most boring box-like modern buildings too which was terrible, in the middle of all the other cool stuff.
-architectural style. I tried very hard to see how the styles varied from country to country. I could see some distinctions between tuscan italy and austrian/swiss, and then the Swiss blending into French which had some similiarities and differences with the Swiss. Belgian and Dutch were quite similiar to each other and distinct from the rest, much less ornate and with exposed brick as the main motif, whereas this is rarely used in the rest of Europe. I wasn't able to make much out in England.


Florence in Italy is one of the most gorgeous cities, so in the next post I'll talk about Florence including some stuff following the threads of this mail ... ciao