The project
Switzerland! It has been my home for a few years now, and I still discover it every day as if each day were the first.
With this project, I wanted to share with you a feeling that comes from childhood: the urge to look at everything with fresh eyes, and the sleep that will not come on the night before a hike, so eager are you to set off. But also the richness of its heritage, and the little hidden treasures you discover in every town.
Maps have always fascinated me. The Dufour maps, the old maps hanging in railway stations: you only have to run your finger over the place names for your imagination to start wandering.
To find that feeling again, nothing beats the memory of the old role-playing games of my childhood, whose spare graphics left everything to the imagination. Hence a low-poly map, made of a few facets rather than thousands of details, which runs on a computer as well as on a phone, in an ordinary web browser.
When I came to Switzerland, I was amazed by the variety of its landscapes, but also bewildered: picturing the lie of the land here is nothing like what I knew in Belgium, where I was born. For a long time, my mental image of the mountain regions stayed very hazy. Hike after hike, I began to connect the valleys, and the high mountains help you rise above it all, literally and figuratively. But placing myself on the scale of the whole of Switzerland remained rather hit-and-miss. The swisstopo and PeakFinder apps helped me a great deal to understand the country. Still, I wanted to go a little further: a pared-down view, on the scale of the valleys. That is how the project was born, with a very simple first map and a few markers to find your bearings.
Then I thought the idea could be taken a little further, and given a more playful side, with a hot-air balloon to get around the map. The first one was truly ugly, but something had been set in motion.
The next evening, I worked on nothing but the balloon: its shape, the way it moves, the sound of the burner and of the wind in flight. Little by little came a few buildings to stand for the towns, then the lakes, the rivers, the clouds, the night, the winter, the IC1 railway line linking Geneva to St. Gallen… It was starting to look like a small miniature world, so I added routes to follow through the towns.
While gathering the data, I was surprised by one thing: it is easy to get, and free. The relief from swisstopo, the places from Switzerland Tourism, the rail network from the Federal Office of Transport… Sometimes you have to ask for an access key, but that is the only hurdle. In Switzerland, access to open data is exceptional.
What remained was to give this little world a soul. I found it in Château-d’Œx, in the Pays-d’Enhaut, which lent it its vocabulary: the hot-air balloon, of which it is the Swiss capital, and paper cutting, practised there for generations. The rest followed naturally: the logbooks, the stamps, the engravings, the stitching and the patches of the backpack.
Paper cutting met low poly: Pocket Switzerland was born.