Head deep inside the imagination of a design great at the hr giger museum...

Sad news reaches us of the death of one of the undoubted greats of cinema design. Following complications arising from a fall, HR Giger, the man who terrified a gazillion film-goers with his

Alien creatures in the suspenseful horror, has departed this world for the next. Giger snagged a deserved Oscar for his multi-mouthed, stomach-popping space monsters and claustrophobic

sets, and his designs were used in several successful sequels. As well as his film work, Giger was a surrealist painter and sculptor of note, and the art world is the poorer for his passing.

Some kind of demigod to sci-fi fanatics, goths, metalheads (Giger fashioned Korn’s mic-stand) and general obsessives of the macabre – there’s one place where the most devoted of devotees

will be making tracks to as a place of pilgrimage: The HR Giger Museum, which has burrowed itself into the innards of the medieval Chateau St Germain in Gruyères, Switzerland. Of particular

note, its dark and fantastical bar is just as wonderfully gruesome as one might expect – a sort of surreal cave supported by arches of spinal vertebrae, littered with sculptural Harkonnen

chairs which might be fashioned from the bones of some long-digested prey. If you make it out of the bar alive, as so many clearly haven’t, the museum is home to many of Giger’s key works

dating from the 1960s to the present day. _@GigerArt_ _@GigerBar_ _Photo, Annie Bertram_ _Photo, Matthias Belz_ _Photo, Annie Bertram_