More about Switzerland.

Let's assume Switzerland is the size of Johor plus Selangor (in Malaysia)... can't be too far off... But it has over 200 train stations!! And over 900 museums.... more specifically - "Switzerland has the world's highest concentration of museums ' 980 in total".

A city like Basel has 40 museums in only 40 sq km. By HDB standards, Basel is not even a city. A town like Ang Mo Kio has twice the population of Basel. So much for HDB town planning theories. Singapore likes to play the numbers game, but Switzerland's number defies logic.

St Gallen has 71,000 inhabitants but 4,900 businesses and 59,000 jobs! Its industry includes metallurgy, mechanical, electrical and medical technology, to name a few. Any Malaysian town like Kota Bahru or even the laid back Dungun where we go to Tenggol from has more than twice the population of St Gallen!

Swiss products are world famous - Nestle, Ciba, Cilag, Swiss knives & Swiss watches, chocolates (the Swiss don't even grow cocoa, they just have winderful milk!), wines and world ranking architects like Mario Botta and Herzog & de Mueron.

Basel itself is the headquarter for an excellent architectural publishing house, Birkhauser, that I would love to work for. How do they achieve such awesome publishing feats in a city of 162,000 people?

However, the complete picture is somewhat more complex. St Gallen has to be seen as a subset of a strip city, a conglomeration of cities linked by railways across the mountain valleys. For these cities, the forests are their parks, the mountains their playgrounds. It's the gift of the railroads; hop on a train in St Gallen and you're in Zurich in an hour. Hop on a train in Dungun-- er, there's no train station in Dungun. Plus, the landscape in incredibly varied and architects practising in Switzerland are well-attuned to the demands of location, of context.

Swiss architects, I suspect, are challenged by 3 issues - location, history and building regulations. They are all the more critical in nowhere else.

Consider location. There's lakes, the terrain, views, the 4 seasons, urban or rural etc.
And history. Some parts go back to the Roman era, they have to be skilled in these subjects...

So what are Singapore's issues?
Maybe the expertise of designing confined spaces in congested urban environment?

Chup...... 30 October 2005