The history of the Interlaken landscape before river channel control was one of a swamp as the Lutschine and Lombach emptied huge Alpine catchments into this flat land adjacent to the Aare River.
Up the valleys Grindelwald, Lauterbrunnen, Saxeten and Lombach where swampiness was not a problem, people have for centuries managed arable land to support their families. Particularly in the Grindelwald area, there are seven centuries of written records documenting how they managed the landscape.
So this region has a tradition of agriculture, crop and animal management in family scale over the lands from Alpine heights to valley floors. The following series of images show how the Interlaken neighborhoods now follow that same tradition of small land management and family food gardens today.
Most families dedicate a patch for seasonal vegetables close to their house.
Veg, flowers, and a place to sit outside.
This ‘front yard’ is 80% mixed garden, with little strip of grass–maybe for a pet.
A garden filled with healthy plants speaks of health and commitment to neighbors and passersby.
When the yard is large enough, there will be found a fruit tree. If even larger, a nut tree.
Each homeowner finds unique balance with the plantings of flowers, fruits, herbs and vegetables.
Municipal water supply for allotment gardens for people who have no gardening space at home.
In the allotments, beauty comes from sweat equity. Healthy allotment gardens are the best of public realm commitments–people and plants in harmony–heart warming it is.
Past the edge of town is a rural landscape with small scale patches of crops.
Small scale farming climbs up the slopes becoming pastures which are grazed and/or cut for animals.
Villages are densely built in the foreground. Pastures in the middle ground with barns for storing hay.
I just can’t stop including more images of healthy veg gardens next to homes–such a fulfilling feeling.
In this image is a public path on the right–and one heck of a healthy veg garden to the left. Tell me that is not a beautiful and inspiring landscape?!
Pasture in the foreground, veg in middle ground, flowers and home in the background. Nuf said.
Fruit trees and crops right up to the edge of town, then each home with its own veg and flower garden. It is not ideology, not theory. It is fact. It is the result of people understanding plants, gardens and landscapes through their own hard work and intelligence.
The yellow dots with black outlines are previously busy successful hotels that are empty, or rarely occupied, or struggling for a four or five-star rating
At the heart of a tremendous landscape. Interlaken.
In the Bernese Oberland region of the Swiss Alps, Interlaken is a 365day/year resort destination on the Aare River connecting two lakes at the confluence of four valleys.
Interlaken alone has more than 900,000 overnight stays/year. Tourism drives the economy. Landscape drives the tourism.
This place is all about design, why? Because this landscape exudes inspiration, it enables captivation. A guest can see it, breathe it, feel it, taste it and touch it. Landscape feeds design.
But change is inevitable. New design is required.
The last of the great Interlaken-Jungfrau five-star resort destinations from the Victorian era. Take the airs. Take the views. Take the walks. Take the cures.
This view of the Jungfrau from Interlaken across the Hohematte today has become nearly a touristic cliche. It was the original tourist attraction. Now it is only 10% of the landscape attractions accessible from Interlaken.
What is the inspirational magic that fills the air in this landscape? For two hundred years the greatest authors, composers and all humans have been captivated by this ethereal landscape beauty which has propelled them to design, compose, write, paint.
Interwoven in all the above is the art of living in these inspirational landscapes. People who live here have translated their inspiration to trychler, yodeler, alphorn, sagen and scherrenschnitt.
Visitors gain access via Interlaken to sites having the UNESCO ‘international seal of approval’:
UNESCO Biosphere Entlebuch: An area of 400 square kilometres to demonstrate a balanced relationship between people and nature unfolds as a mystical world with pre-Alpine moorland and karst landscapes.
UNESCO World Heritage Jungfrau Aletsch: An overwhelming display of the Alps’ natural beauty covering over 800 square kilometres. At its heart lies the mighty rock massif of the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau and the glacial landscape around the Great Aletsch Glacier. The Aletsch Glacier is 23km long, the longest glacier in the Alps.
So what’s the problem? The hotel, resort destination cycle has been bottoming as the visitor profile has changed. Nobody has grasped what is the 21st century successful tourism paradigm. Four and five star hotels are out of business. Other hotels from the Art Noveau era can not easily meet the 21st century energy savings regulations. And the visitor who 30 years ago would visit one or two weeks, now visits two or three days.
Berner Oberland Region = 12,000 beds; net occupancy rate 50%
Interlaken Region = 4,000 beds; net occupancy rate 64%
International Arrivals = Europe 50%, Asia 25%, Americas 15%, Africa 5%, Middle East 5%
Interlaken Region Arrivals = Swiss 45%, International 55%
In conclusion, this Interlaken landscape region has undeniable attraction to Swiss and every geographical segment of international visitor. The annual visits are steady. The communication and transportation infrastructure is up to date and best in class; but the types of accommodations are not leading the way. The tradition of four and five star has all but disappeared–it struggles.
But there are committed private sector players whose future is based upon visitors’ feet on the landscape, regional transportation and watch consolidator. Both of them rely on successful, comfortable and convenient overnights.
Where does this landscape tourism go in the first half of the 21st century?
Airbnb, local holiday apartments, dormitory accomodations?
Are the traditional comforts of four and five star hospitality culture a memory, not suited to today’s green regulations, today’s pace of life, today’s constrained economics?
Or is there a new paradigm still undiscovered that matches and challenges this timeless inspirational landscape?
That is a question for designers, entrepreneurs and lovers of landscape.
For centuries, humans from this region have used the alphorn to express how this landscape inspires them.
Berner Oberland landscape and plants work their way into the finest corners of human inspiration, design and crafts.
Gentian blue, four species…but the color of lapis lazuli…implies the cultural wealth of millennia.
The local brewery, with 700 yrs of history, sells its brew in two litre refillables–collectible graphic design, no?
Lake steamers connect Interlaken to all towns and villages on the Thunersee and Brienzersee–fresh air carried on fresh water from the Grimsel Pass glaciers.
The arable land yields food for humans who respect that miracle in their crafts and architecture.
Whether by jodeling, alphorns or tales…human connections with the landscape are easily accessible in this region.
A visitor can access this landscape in every imaginable manner.
Human shelters for entertainment and education–the old and the new both sitting nicely in the landscape.
Departing Interlaken from the Hohematte foreground in the direction of the Jungfrau begins an exceptional landscape design sequence of spaces experience working up through the valleys to Grindelwald or Lauterbrunnen.
This is a view across the Hohematte toward the Jungfrau. The Hohematte is a 14 hectare meadow in the center of town, first owned by the Augustinian Monastery, then by Bern and finally in the 1860s bought by a consortium of locals who have preserved it as a meadow in perpetuity.
Interlaken blends modern with tradition in many aspects of design, arts and crafts.
Ethnobotany–only the bravest of the climbers could find edelweiss–Leontopodium alpinum.
Network interfaces–urban quality interfaces at the foot of Eiger and Jungfrau. Convenient and awe inspiring.
For walkers the wayfinding is superb. Networks to networks–superb. Clear, crisp.
In Interlaken, the Aare River connects the upstream Brienzersee to the Thunersee and continues as the largest tributary to the upper Rhine.
Churches tell the political and religious history–Catholic, Reformed–Austrians, French…via arts and crafts.
Art Nouveau craftsmanship inspired by the landscape.
When I opened my eyes…it was hard to focus…near and far…both fuzzy. Then the foreground cleared and I could see in the distance…across the broad green pastures…I saw the city center.
It had developed over time, drawing resources and energy from the sun, the earth and water–all the while transforming those flows into new forms, new shelters.
The shelters were populated by all diversities of living entities with energy flows, day after day, night after night, until…until…like a Roman settlement in North Africa, they just no longer could sustain neither the energy flows, nor the diversities of living entities.
And the next day, the sun rose; and I was home before the sun set.
I walked through the forest. Neither the date, nor the day mattered. It was in the north. It was in the mountains. Spruce forest. Densely packed, tall trees, more than 100 feet each.
I walked a ridge in that forest. The canopy sheltered. I wasn’t cold. Somewhere, way up there, was sun. Thin, narrow, fractured beams twinkled and sparkled near my feet.
Delicate cloud edges whisped. They came close…on the edges of forming or dissipating or both…here and there…from time to time.
I was tired from walking and climbing. I looked for a place to sit. My Irish roots have always worked magic for me in forests. So it was today when I was invited to sit down and take the shelter of a mushroom.
The ground was soft and the mushroom stem gently molded itself to my spine and rib cage. I was comfortable. My breathing became easy. It slowed. The rhythm eased my eyelids shut.
The various clouds appear, disappear, move and change at many different speeds simultaneously–and today they hid the giants of Jungfrau, Monch and Eiger–normally visible in this frame.
I am working on a story, The Orient Express, whose beginning and dénouement occur in the mountains surrounding Mürren in Switzerland.
This landscape inspires me because its very presence is mysterious–a consuming presence that forces me to interact with an elusive and overwhelming mystery…without beginning, without end…
The yodeling exuded the essence of all music…humans, without words, communicating from, and to, some magical landscape node. The yodeling had freedom, it had discipline, it had beauty and it conveyed, at the same time, a pleasant, almost jolly reverence, and an aura of relaxation.
Listening to music is a linear experience, just like walking though a garden, a landscape. Music and beauty. Gardens and beauty. Portals to transcendence. There has to be a linkage. Timeless experiences. Trance? Yodeler trance?
He stood up, stretched, decided to take a walk outside back down toward the center of town. The evening air was sharp and cool. It was quiet, Wednesday near 9PM, really quiet. Grindelwald was at the top end of the valley. No through automobile traffic. He paused, listened…maybe he could hear the Lutschine River, about two hundred or so meters down hill, in the valley bottom. When he started walking again, all he could hear were his own footsteps.
Then somewhere up ahead, he heard what he instinctively knew had to be yodeling. Softly at first, then it filled his ears. It was like barbershop, a cappella, unaccompanied singing, a group. His ears carried him. His ears, transforming like a delicate cocoon…and the music wrapped him. He was inside the music…inside the music…suffused by an intense hypnotic, timeless, yet strangely joyful experience.
In no more than a hundred meters, and in the dark, the yodeling had led him just off the main street. On his left, behind a large tree, he saw a shop or something, tucked behind a hillside. The yodeling was coming from that direction. On a weakly lighted, simple sign attached to the side of a smallish free standing building, he saw the name…Blumisalp Stubbe
The Stubbe had an outdoor terrace, facing the mountains, facing the Unterergletscher, and that was where he found the yodelers, about a dozen, maybe a dozen and a half of them. Everybody he knew always chuckled when yodeling was mentioned, something Americans had once seen back in the 1950s or early 1960s on the Ed Sullivan or the Lawrence Welk television variety shows.
But, in the still of these extraordinary evening mountains, in the quiet of the night, when the mountains were the foreground, middle ground and background all at once, that yodeling had a strong resonance that seemed appropriate to the scale of this place and respectful to its character.
He thought, I don’t know anything about this, so, who am I to judge…but…it does have a very nice feel, a certain sweetness, that’s for sure. He stood and listened. For a moment, he couldn’t put words to it, but for the briefest moment, he thought he almost felt the very beginning of that same warm feeling that had overwhelmed him yesterday afternoon, the first time the mountains possessed him. Then, as soon as the thought formed…the feeling was gone…the intimation disappeared…instantaneously absent. It was, nevertheless, in its brevity, enjoyable.
The yodelers were on the terrace of the Stubbe. All the Stubbe terrace doors were open. The yodelers stood in two lines, at the side of the terrace, singing to the mountains and the Stubbe guests simultaneously.
The yodelers were organized by height, shorter in front, taller behind. They yodeled two more songs that seemed to have verses and choruses…always a cappella…the singers were men and women, a combination of young and old, all in native clothes, native costumes, somewhat Amish-like…very clean costumes, dominated by black and white, well pressed, black trousers, white shirts and black vests with black lapels and black collars, tastefully accented with smallish embroidered wild flowers–gentian blues–edelweiss silver greens.
The men stood rather casually with their hands in their pockets, but there was definitely a grouped organization. And the ladies, well, they, too, looked like Amish people…simultaneously proud and humble…lots of white lace over black cloth…very discreet, no asset display…and their decorations, too–mountain wild flowers.
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Jodlergruppe Edelwyss-Starnen, from Grindelwald, singing Mys Alpli, one alp is a field, a pasture, a productive piece of mountain land where farm animals graze. Thus in the background of this you can hear the bells of the sheep, goats and cows. The full version can be found at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/jodelgruppe-edelwyss-starnen/id329166348
And I woke up to this glorious sunshine–these huge dancing displays of spring green foliage–an ebullient reality…freshly mown patches of domestic lawn in the air…freshly cut first hay of the season in the air…all those smells, fragrances, Syringa, Philadelphus, aromas…weaving in and out of each other…rubbing over each other…exuding…resonating…deeply…again and again…
Filled my lungs again and again until I became inside out dizzy with its sweetness…then I made a mistake.
I read a newspaper. In the article, I was warned that too many cow farts would doom life as I was enjoying it. Naw…ain’t gonna believe that am I? Spring is here. I’m going out for a walk before I miss it!
…too busy…I almost missed Spring…12 of 12…beginning…last
