In Italia: The Avid Traveller...

So you may be wondering where I have been for almost two weeks? Well we spent 8 days traveling as a studio around Europe. We began our journey EARLY Saturday morning (6 am) heading to the train station. We were dragging from a birthday party out the night before... thankfully we would have a 4 hour train ride ahead of us to Milan and then on to Basel, Switzerland.

Switzerland was beautiful... we spent 3 nights in Basel touring the town itself and then the nearby towns, Lucern and Zurich. In Weil am Rhem (on the border of Switzerland and Germany) we visited the Vitra Design Campus. Vitra is a furniture design manufacturer that got it's start in the 1950's. It was a fascinating museum and really neat to see pieces designed by Frank Gehry, Charles and Ray Eames, and other inspiring designers. Vitra works with different designers and architects to create their numerous collections. Here are a few of my favorite pieces...

So fun to climb on!

The blue chair is our Herman Miller chairs... Recognize it Grandma?? I was so excited when I saw this... kind of confused to see our chairs in the museum, but it was exciting! We spent an entire day at the campus, looking around the museums, taking tours of the different buildings on their campus designed by Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Tado Ando, and Herzog & De Meuron. In Switzerland we also saw Cathedrals, some modern architecture consisting of hospitals, pharmacy buildings, and churhces. In France we went to Le Corbusier's Ronchamp. And on our way to Verona, we stopped in Lucern, Switzerland to see Calatrava's addition to the train station and the KKL museum.

Lucerne, Switzerland

Ronchamp, France

(Le Corbusier)

Then our next stop would be Verona, Italy where we took a guided bus tour of the countryside villas by Architect Palladio. Our tour guide was Wilma ("pronounced "Vilma" because in Italian, we do not have the letter W"). She was an interesting character, but full of interesting facts none the less. We saw about 3 villas by Palladio. After this we visited Castelvecchio and another museum that Carlos Scarpa designed additions for.