Thursday 15 May 2008

Road Trip

Spent much of the last week hopping around Austria and Switzerland looking at Euro 2008 venues. In four rather manic days I managed to visit Zurich, Vienna, Innsbruck and Salzburg. Here's some stuff I saw...


The Zurich stadium. Really impressive structure, it's hunkered down into the ground, so from the outside it looks like a single story building, great unrestricted viewing internally.


It's surrounded by large steel panels left untreated so they'll slowly rust to add character.


In the Zurich train station we spotted this animated light installation, made from an individually controllable grid of LED spheres. Had real depth and movement. Just been covered by The Cool Hunter (they have much better pictures and more info on who made it).


Swiss multistory car parks are a model in efficiency. Each level has a little digital read out telling you how many bays are available. Added to which each bay then has a little light above it - red for full, green for available. When looking down the line you can instantly tell which spaces are available and where they are.


The Ski jump tower in Innsbruck lives up to the hype, sure you've all seen the images of this Zaha Hadid designed beauty. It sits protectively over the town and has a cafe space on the very top floor with stunning views.


It's being used as a Fan Park for the tournament so we went to check it out, I managed to get out onto the launch platform and can assure you it's a very brave man who can throw themselves off from here.

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