Sometimes called Geneva’s balcony, Mount Salève is located in Haute-Savoie, on the French-Swiss border. It overlooks the Genevois region and the entire Lake Geneva basin. Long reserved for seasoned hikers, it saw a surge in visitors with the construction of a rack railway in 1892, which was replaced in 1932 by a cable car whose far more modern engineering offered a ten-minute airborne journey instead of an hour — hikers needed three. Designed by the Swiss architect Maurice Braillard (1879–1965) in collaboration with engineers Georges Riondel and André Rebuffel (a cable-car specialist), the modernity and efficiency of its mechanics are matched by the modernist architecture of its upper station. A tour-de-force erected on the edge of a precipice at an altitude of 1,100 metres, the reinforced-concrete bridge-building, left in its raw formwork finish, has since become a marker in the landscape.… Read the article
Sometimes called Geneva’s balcony, Mount Salève is located in Haute-Savoie, on the French-Swiss border. It overlooks the Genevois region and the entire Lake Geneva basin. Long reserved for seasoned hikers, it saw a surge in visitors with the construction of a rack railway in 1892, which was replaced in 1932 by a cable car whose far more modern engineering offered a ten-minute airborne journey instead of an hour — hikers needed three. Designed by the Swiss architect Maurice Braillard (1879–1965) in collaboration with engineers Georges Riondel and André Rebuffel (a cable-car specialist), the modernity and efficiency of its mechanics are matched by the modernist architecture of its upper station. A tour-de-force erected on the edge of a precipice at an altitude of 1,100 metres, the reinforced-concrete bridge-building, left in its raw formwork finish, has since become a marker in the landscape.… Read the article
