Alsace Basel

ALSACE (France) and BASEL (Switzerland)

Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp Chapel

+ 9 buildings by 7 Pritzker Prize of architecture

Group of only 8 participants

Ronchamp Chapel by

Le Corbusier

Haut-Koenigsbourg (Alsace)

BASEL is well worth a day exploration, thanks to an attractive old town with fine buildings like the Münster (Cathedral), the painstakingly renovated City Hall, the Barfüsserkirche (now the Historical Museum), and the Spalentor that once served as a defensive gateway to Alsace.

With his museum situated on the Rhine, the architect Mario Botta has created an unusual stage for Jean Tinguely’s kinetic sculptures. This museum is unlike others: here, things rattle, squeak, crash and thump. Colourful scrap rotates, multi-coloured lights flicker. It is a place full of vitality, laughter, amazement and discovery; a place that sets the feelings in motion and where art reaches across to the spectator.

VITRA DESIGN MUSEUM buildings: by Frank Gehry, Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid, Álvaro Siza Vieira, Herzog & de Meuron

all recipients of the Pritzker Architecture Prize), and buildings by Antonio Citterio and Sir Nicholas Grimshaw

FONDATION BEYELER by Renzo Piano (Pritzker Architecture Prize)

Museum Tinguely by Mario Botta

Goetheanum by Rudolph Steiner

Strasbourg Cathedral, Haut-Koenisberg castle, Colmar

Vitra dome-shaped tent construction by Buckminster Fuller

Vitra small knock-down petrol station by Jean Prouvé

The Salt Factory by Ledoux, an incredible marvel of city planning in the 18th Century

The Vitra Design Museum maintains one of the largest collections of modern furniture design in the world, with objects representing all of the major eras and stylistic periods from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present.

Goetheanum by

Rudolph Steiner

Strasbourg Cathedral was the world's tallest building from 1647 to 1874.

The cathedral's south transept houses an 18-meters astronomical clock, one of the largest in the world. It is is unusually accurate; it indicates leap years, equinoxes, and much more astronomical data. it also indicates solar time, the day of the week (each represented by a god of mythology), the month, the year, the sign of the zodiac, the phase of the moon and the position of several planets.

Strasbourg has one of the earliest façade whose construction is inconceivable without prior drawing. Strasbourg and Cologne Cathedral together represent some of the earliest uses of architectural drawing.

The old centre of COLMAR, is typically and whimsically Alsatian, with crooked houses, half-timbered and painted, on crooked lanes – all extremely pretty.

Colmar's attractions don't stop at its buildings; it is also the proud possessor of one of the last and most extraordinary of all Gothic paintings – the altarpiece for St Anthony's monastery at Issenheim, painted by Mathias Grünewald.

Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the nineteenth-century sculptor responsible for New York's Statue of Liberty, was born at 30 rue des Marchands. This has been turned into the Musée Bartholdi containing Bartholdi's personal effects, plus the original designs for the statue.

Colmar, is a marvellously preserved Alsatian city,

a great example of historical restoration