samedi 8 décembre 2018

Genève: Les grottes

http://lingmagazine.com/feature/where-the-smurfs-live/

"So where do the Smurfs live? If those famous little blue creatures with the white hats have a life outside the cartoons, their place of residence might just be Geneva. Because this serious-looking Swiss city, which keeps its joie de vivre under wraps, the city of Lake Leman, of the UN office and the old town on the hill, hides an open secret.
The city of international organizations has another side to it: the bizarre appearance of parts of Les Grottes, a neighbourhood located behind the Cornavin railway station just to the northwest of the city centre. Here, the spirit of the Art Nouveau architect Antoni Gaudi is a palpable presence. This is how the architects Robert Frei, Christian Hunziker and Georges Berthoud wished it when they built a residential complex here between 1982 and 1984.
And the results are surprising. As they say on Swiss Tourism’s official website, this part of town offers “balconies in relief, wrought iron railings and, above all, no straight lines!” The buildings’ extravagant design, deliberately asymmetrical, has an apparent chaos within which a strange order grows. So where do the Smurfs come in? The neighbourhood’s nickname has come about due to the “resemblance between these dwellings and the houses in which the little cartoon characters live.” These strange, rather dreamlike surroundings evoke the mushrooms that house the legendary figures created by Peyo, the illustrator Pierre Culliford."

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