Guided tour of Riehen
Meeting place: In front of the church / Dorfkirche Tram station Riehen Dorf (tram no. 6)
End: Wenkenhof
Meeting place: In front of the church / Dorfkirche Tram station Riehen Dorf (tram no. 6)
End: Wenkenhof
Riehen - a small community in the canton of Basel-Stadt - likes to call itself the large green village. Situated in the valley of the river Wiese and surrounded by fields and vineyard-covered hills, Riehen is characterized by a mixture of rural and urban way of living. Its many parks and gardens remind us that, starting in the mid 16th c., Basel patricians favored this area and had their summer estates built here. During our tour, we have a look at how some of them - e.g., the Berower, Sarasin, Wettstein, or the Wenken estate - have been transformed through time.
Our tour starts in front of the village church that used to be at the center of a medieval fortification. We look at some of the surrounding buildings, such as the Klösterli and the Meierhof, and talk about Riehen’s history. On the way to the Berower Park, we observe the landscape spreading underneath the Tüllinger Hill and discuss Renzo Piano’s design of the Fondation Beyeler, as well as Peter Zumthor’s project for its future extension. A short walk through the garden of the former Sarasin estate brings us to Rössligasse and its old village houses. We continue through the commercial center and discuss ways in which architectural interventions of the late 1950s, as well as the more recent ones, have changed the character of the community. After visiting the historic Wettstein houses, we take a bus for a brief ride to Wenken Park. We look at the 17th c. “Old Wenkenhof” and the 18th c. baroque “New Wenkenhof”, and end the tour by Richard Serra’s sculptural installation in the nearby English-style park.
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