Swiss Sojourn 3
III. The Campus on the Hill
The third installment of my 1995 Swiss journal, continued from Martin’s Place. Being a geographer, I couldn’t help but convey the spatiality of the bucolic yet urban setting where for three years I labored on my arcane dissertation.
The University of Zürich has two main campuses. The main one is densely embedded downtown overlooking the Alstadt (Old Town). Mine is uptown, embedded in Irchel Park, 32 hectares of woods, meadows and wetlands, the largest open space in the city. That campus is devoted to scientific research institutes, of which mine, the Geographical Institute, is one. A dozen or so five-story building dominate the campus, interspersed with a number of smaller ones. Built in the 1970s, its hulking modernist structures are linked by broad passageways running below grade, interrupted by lounges in atria that admit daylight, clustered around lecture halls. There are in fact as many as ten different levels in some places, but half are underground.
The Swiss are super-organized to the point of OCD. (Example: I booked a trip to Wengen that involved six modes of transport on one ticket; every conveyance was on time with very little waiting.) At university, buildings and rooms are assigned numbers; floors have letters. Thus, the postcode, as it were, for the room where I and seven other students toil is Y25L94 (Building 25, level L, room 94; Y designates the Irchel campus). As there seem to be fewer than 25 buildings, I do not know why mine has that number. When I walk to school, I enter at the D level, where cars park and trucks unload. Usually I take the elevator to H level and walk across the plaza to building 25. I have no clue what goes on in levels A, B and C, most likely offices and equipment that manage the physical plant, accessible only by passkey. Lecture halls and a couple of mini-mensas inhabit the G level, while the spacious Mensa (our refectory) is on H at ground level.
As the campus sits on a hillside, “ground level” depends on where one is. The main tram stop, called Milchbuck, must be below A level. One climbs steadily for ten minutes to reach the plaza at level H. On the way, one passes through a grove of trees, then a grassy field that borders on an artificial pond where ducks and gulls congregate. A bridge takes one to the base of the first stairway leading to an elevator kiosk to the parking garage. Then more steps to a plaza flanked by concrete and steel sculptures and a few low buildings. Keep on trudging upstairs past a concrete water sculpture, and there’s the main plaza. That’s a good spot to catch your breath and regard the panorama of meadows crisscrossed with pebbled walkways, a smaller pond with wetlands, and the forested slopes of Züriberg, one of several hills ringing the city protected from development, all with mazes of walking and bridal paths I often tramp along except when rain turns the ocher clay soil into muck.
Gazing toward the forested mountain beyond, one forgets that a congested, six-lane autobahn runs below that connects the city to its northern suburbs and Flughafen Airport. The park itself is an artificial ecotope said to be Switzerland’s grandest exercise in landscape architecture. Through the 1970’s, it was not much more than grassy open space home to an archive of municipal documents and an experimental farm. The library still exists, as does the farm, its cow-barn snuggled close to building 25, just outside my office window, a chicken coop farther off. Moos, baas, snorts and whinnies filter up from its four-legged occupants as men in coveralls pilot little tractors towing loads of fodder and manure. Buried under them, an electronic underground autobahn — conduits of glass and copper nerve fibers — transmits the brainwork raging above them.
My habit is to rise early and, after breakfast, follow Berninastrasse to cross over the autobahn and ascend to the campus, about a ten-minute trudge. Weather permitting, I might stroll along gravel paths to an observation point overlooking the campus. Directly south lies downtown Zürich and the long tongue of the Zürichsee panting toward alps I can barely discern on certain days when atmospheric conditions are auspicious.
Thanks to my insomnia, by the time most people show up at the department, I’ve put in a good two hours of work, fueled by demitasses of French roast from a coin-op coffeemaker in the faculty room and buttered soft pretzels from a mini-mensa four levels down. Y25L94 is a barn of a room large enough to garage a fire truck that’s home base for a dozen diploma, masters and doctoral students. They chat in local dialect or High German, responded to in French or Italian by those hailing from the farther reaches of the country. As the only tongues I’m fluent in are English, Fortran, and C, I’m not privy to those conversations. Knowing I’ll never acquire Schweizerdeutsch or its local dialect (an unwritten language with no fixed orthography), and having a frail facility to speak in tongues, I’m grateful to the majority of my colleagues who are willing to address me in English.
Switzerland may be the most linguistically diverse country in Europe, and here I am, a tongue-tied American. That’s me, Geoff the imperialist.
Next: Shades of Gray
