POSTCARD FROM ZURICH By Molnar

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30847, 4 September 1965, Page 5

POSTCARD FROM ZURICH By Molnar

QUR plane brakes to standstill. The first sight of Switzerland that looms through the window is a four-engined plane. Painted boldly to cover the whole fuselage in letters huge and green is Shamrock Shillelagh Chowder and Marching Association. The shaving mirror in my hotel is a surgical instrument. A head twice my size, it shadowless watches me shaving. Every bristle is an individual to be pruned. These are the things the Swiss magnify. Headlines are small. News? The National Anthem has been changed recently. Nobody liked the old one. The change brings no disturbing novelties. Nobody likes the new one either. But the tune is an improvement. The old music sounded very much like "God Save The Queen." The Swiss are the last nation to take reprisals against anybody. but there has been too much talk lately in Mr Wilson's Cabinet about the Wicked Old Bankers in Zurich playing merry hell with sterling. The world here is under control. Everything works, everything is sane, solid, durable. Builder’s guarantee, including painting, is two years. Schools are magnificent. Designed to

be part of the landscape, they make learning play and play learning. They have everything human ingenuity has devised to make the world of children comfortable and exciting. It is here the future citizen prepares himself for life. Under each school a bomb-proof air-raid shelter, equipped with complete emergency operating theatres. Blue aluminium trams, heated and elegant, fast and noiseless, glide through the city. Traffic moves easily. Technical inventions are to improve our lives. Or are they? Melbourne just ordered 120 of these trams. The sun shines unobtrusively. Outside the Kunsthalle contented citizens bask in its warmth as if by subscription. On an ornamental pool a side-whiskered bank clerk puts a model ocean liner through its paces with radar. Fountains swirl. Red-and-blue flags yawn and stretch languidly. Across the square the new theatre will be built. The architect is somebody outlandish. Finnish or Norwegian. Somebody from the North. The citizens move around happy, stolid, unsuspecting. The architect is Utzon.