Floating Culture Plan

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31345, 15 April 1967, Page 23

Floating Culture Plan

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter)

ZURICH (Switzerland). Plans are being studied for a floating cultural centre to take the arts to communities living on the shores of Lake Zurich.

The centre would tour the lake once or twice a month, dropping anchor near about 10 different towns to present concerts, plays, and art exhibitions.

Mr Georg Muller, the progressive director of the Zurcher Werkbuhne, Zurich’s experimental theatre, who thought of the scheme, believes that, by taking to the water, the arts could reach what is by Swiss standards a potentially large audience.

Mr Muller, aged 31, says that about; 600,000 people live beside or near the lake, which covers an area of about 34 square miles. Apart from Zurich, Switzerland’s largest city, which stands at the northern tip of the lake, the area has few theatre buildings or concert or exhibition halls.

People who would hesitate to travel to Zurich for the arts might well show real interest if the arts were brought to their doorsteps, Mr Muller believes. Varied Programme

He foresees the completed centre circling the lake about 10 months each year with regularly-changing programmes featuring both Swiss and foreign artists and performers. Mr Muller, who was born in

nearby Herriiberg and studied theatre technique in Berlin, says that it was the high price of land in Zurich which first caused him to think of the project. While considering the cost of building sites a few years ago, he came to the conclusion that the only place he could afford to construct the kind of theatre he wanted would be on the lake.

“Once the idea of building on water, came to me, the conception of a mobile structure automatically presented itself,” he says.

He does not claim the basic idea as original, citing, among others, the architect Le Corbusier. Would Be Unique

As far as he knows, no such mobile centre as he envisages exists in the world today, and for this reason, he says, prominent architects both in Switzerland and abroad are interested in the project. During the last two years, some have drawn up partial plans, while engineers and ship-builders have also put toward proposals. The challenge before them, as Mr Muller sees it, is to design a centre large enough to contain a theatre-concert hall with a stage and 500 seats, a separate hall for art exhibitions, a foyer, a restaurant and kitchen, as well as cloakrooms and offices. The whole structure would be towed by a tug carrying equipment for generating electricty and would cost, he estimates, between £333,000 and £500,000. Mr Muller thinks that it should not be impossible to

raise such a sum, particularly in the wealthy banking metropolis of Zurich, once it is realised that the centre would attract foreigners and tourists as well as the local Swiss. Support Offers

He says that the Mayor of Zurich, Dr. Sigmund Widmer, is sympathetic towards the project and that prominent local people have formed a committee to lend their support

“The next step is in exhibition on a Zurich lake steamer in October this year,” Mr Muller says. “We shall show the plan in all its aspects—models, propulsion methods, stabilisation, precautions against ice, proposals for the cultural programme and so on.” Then, he hopes, sufficient interest will be aroused to allow the centre, long a drawing-board dream, to become a reality.