We are lucky to be able to spend our summers abroad with our kids in our camper van and this year we went further afield, starting in Belgium, and heading to Munich via Luxembourg, and then back via Lake Constance and France. This year historical and cultural visits included Art Gallery Am Tunnel, the National Museum of History & Art, and the Bock Casements in the stunning Luxembourg City, along with the Haus de Kunst (Munich), the Kloster Andechs (Herrsching), and the Mercedes Benz Museum (Stuttgart) in Germany, and the Centre Pompidou- Metz, Chateau Musee Vodou (Strasbourg) and various stained glass windows in the cathedral & churches of Metz (including those designed by artists Jean Cocteau and Marc Chagall) in France. We also had a day trip into Stein am Rhein in Switzerland where we visited the St George’s Abbey Museum and the Museum Lindwurm.
Two of the highlights of our trip were, firstly, the Museum Haus Dix where artist Otto Dix lived with his wife, Martha, and their three children from 1936 until his death, in 1969. This house is located in Germany on a hillside with a view over Lake Constance, between Gaienhofen and Hemmenhofen. There weren’t many of his famous artworks there - most are in the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, sadly closed when we were there - but they dealt with this well by putting monochrome images of these paintings on the interior walls of the house where they think they were hung. You could scan a QR code to find out more about each of the artworks, as well as hear about the history of the house and also family life from one of Dix’s relatives. Secondly, the Weissonhof Museum located on the edge of Stuttgart, which is based in two semi-detached houses designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, as part of the Weissenhof housing estate. This estate was built for the 1927 Deutscher Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart, Germany. It was an international showcase of modern architecture's aspiration to provide cheap, simple, efficient, and good-quality housing, and architect Mies van der Rohe was in charge of the project. The building was simple yet stunning in terms of it’s design and highly conscious of utilising space, including having a roof terrace. The rest of the estate - with a few buildings sadly destroyed - is privately owned but each has a plaque outside with information about the architect and an interior floor plan.
