Swiss made.

SWITZERLAND--AN URBAN PORTRAIT

By Roger Diener, Jacques Herzog, Marcel Meili, Pierre de Meuron and Christian Schmid. Basel: Birkhauser 2005. [euro]44.90

Produced under the aegis of the ETH Studio Basel and its Contemporary City Institute, this extraordinary publication comprises 1016 pages in three small format square volumes, plus a folding map. There are 800 colour illustrations, an additional 200 in black and white, and 50 drawings. The thoroughness of the publication is, well, very Swiss.

That is only appropriate, since the subject matter is the country itself--what it is, and how it might develop if only its true nature and potential were understood. It is the exploration of how 'facts' about the country suggest the basis of 'a new urban topography' that make the mini-family of publications a fascinating and varied read.

At one extreme, there is a series of pages showing the relative size and shape of every single canton in the country, which emerge as minute markings which have a comic element given the tiny scale of the images themselves. The fold-out map, on the other hand, is a political and design proposition about how the country should pursue its urban futures. In between there are informative and stimulating sections on every geographical area, on the relationship between cities and regions, and how statistics on more or less everything about Swiss life can be related, producing unexpected conjunctions and discontinuities.

It must be tempting for Swiss architects, especially those with an international reputation, to regard their home country as an anachronism--related to the EU but not in it, ambiguously democratic (do all those referendums represent progress or reaction?), and intent as a nation on literally and metaphorically ploughing its own furrow. What the authors have in fact done is to suggest a possible future for Switzerland which makes it more like itself rather than a version of somewhere else; in so doing they have had to address the widest range of issues and connections that provide the context for architectures which scarcely feature here, but which the authors are more than capable of providing. P. F.