Zurich airport
Zurich's airport is one of the best I've seen in terms of visual design. Not architecture or interiors (those were nothing to write home about) but the design system in the airport was insanely beautiful.
It occurred to me that the simplicity of Swiss design (the home of Helvetica, for example) probably comes from the simplicity of the country's beauty. There are mountains. Mountains are beautiful. You don't have to do much to convince anybody of that fact. So really, when you're designing, what you're trying to do is get out of the way. To leave things as they are. To not ruin the beauty of the mountains by adding too much.
The design system in the airport is incredibly simple. It's black and white. A lot of white space. And a beautifully simple font. That's how all information in the airport is communicated. It's so good that it's the first thing I noticed.
The restraint says a lot. The Swiss flag is red and white, for example, and those colours are featured nowhere in the design system.
The other thing is that everything you see /is/ designed. I'm writing this in the Cape Town airport right now. The departure and arrival boards here look they're built in Excel. Making it beautiful wasn't something they thought of. But that's okay.
Here, the appeal of the country is the diversity. It's the rainbow nation. Let's throw shit together and see what happens. The collisions, the haphazardness, the magic that happens in the meeting of unexpected things. That's their vibe.
In Zurich. The vibe is well thought out. It's simplicity. Without even leaving the airport, I can imagine what Zurich is like. They probably have clean, uncomplicated, reliable public transport. The architecture probably isn't fancy. It's probably just trying to get out of the way so you can see the things that are beautiful without too much distraction. Without too much clutter. Without too much getting in the way.