Geneva and Zurich
The seemingly open border. Even 20 years, it wasn't so simple: you could drive through, but you'd be stopped within a very few minutes.
Off hours in Geneva.
The color range is strikingly severe.
East of the city and climbing the Jura: a leftover from Napoleon.
The Zurichsee.
The swift Limmat, which flows from the lake.
The older part of the city hugs the river and prospers with tourists, seemingly oblivious of high prices. The peeping spire belongs to the Predigerkirche.
The color palette says "festive retail."
A nearby residential lane, scrubbed tight.
Half-timbering.
More half-timbering.
A half-timbered wall is so clean that, viewed from this angle, it looks like dough rising in breadpans.
The railway station is a 5-minute walk from the lake's outlet, and it is here that Zurich lives up to its reputation as a center of global banking. Still, it's all low-key: forget highrises.
The Swiss may not be famously exotic, but Zurich is full of buildings from about 1900 that speak of bourgeois longings. Here the Urania observatory, which looks both down at the city and (thanks to Carl Zeiss) up at the stars.
The observatory is said to have opened in 1907, despite the date on the cornerstone.
A touch of Orientalism.
The Red Castle (1891-3), by Heinrich Ernst.
Athenian allusion seems almost pedestrian alongside such eastern motifs.
Whatever madness possessed the Swiss then is gone now, or at least replaced by a Corbusian chill. Here: Swiss Re.