Anniversary trip to Venice
A warm and firm handshake between Paul Lüchinger and Daniel Meyer sealed the foundation of the Lüchinger+Meyer engineering office in the summer of 1994. Thirty years later, our office can be found at 4 locations and our team has grown to almost 100, we have successively expanded our expertise and realised well over a thousand projects … In short: Lüchinger+Meyer is a success story – we take stock today quite immodestly and full of pride.
An extraordinary trip for the entire office team was to accompany this special anniversary. Venice, la Serenissima, the city of winged lions, water and concentrated history, welcomed 85 guests from our offices in Zurich, Lucerne, Lausanne and Madrid for four days. The varied programme offered plenty of scope for personal excursions but, in keeping with the occasion, was mainly determined by many joint activities. In addition to experiencing culinary highlights at the time-honoured Antica Locanda Montin and the Trattoria da Romana in Burano, we were – naturally! – particularly interested in the architectural culture of Venice.
It proved to be a real stroke of luck that we were able to engage Franz Wanner as our city and island guide, an artist, cosmopolitan and Venice expert who guided us through the lagoon city with passion and perseverance. His great familiarity with the Serenissima and his inexhaustible knowledge opened many a closed door for us, introduced us to the art and skills of famous Venetians such as Sansovino, Palladio and Tintoretto and guided us through the labyrinth of alleyways, squares and bridges with so many anecdotes that we easily managed the 20,000 steps on Friday.
We willingly followed Franz Wanner from the Palazzo Corner de la Ca’ Grande to Piazza San Marco, from San Giorgio Maggiore to the Scuola Grande di San Rocco and Scuola Grande delle Miseriacordia. Saturday took us to Torcello, the cradle of the lagoon city with its remarkable churches of Santa Maria Assunta and San Fosca, and then to picturesque Burano with its colourful facades.
There were also plenty of opportunities for socialising in various formations. We were able to refresh our shared LM memories, turn night into day, get to know our new colleagues from Madrid and enjoy sundowners with a view, among other things…
At the end of an exhilarating trip, we agree with the author Cees Nooteboom’s impressions of Venice: ‘Here people had done something that was impossible, on these marshy pieces of land they had devised an antidote, a spell against everything that was ugly in the world. I had seen these images a hundred times and yet I wasn’t prepared for it because it was perfect.’
