Sorry about the photo. The location is Montech in France and is a mechanism for replacing locks by pushing a wall of water up a slope. Here's a youtube link... Montech Water Slope I was there last year but sadly it is no longer in operation. This is how it looked last year...
I have one ready from a previous thread where I thought I'd nailed it. I took this picture when I got my new camera and as I was taking shots using a tripod at night a passerby asked me what I was doing, and when I explained the picture and the bothersome light in the top right corner he said "I can turn that off for you, if you want". It turned that he was the building operations manager and could actually turn off that light! I was working in that building at the time, somewhere on the 16th floor. So in which city is this building?
This is not in Switzerland. But they speak 4 languages in Switzerland and one of those languages is indeed spoken here. Considering this was a new SLR camera for me and one of the first images I took with it, I like this picture. Most people living in this general area would immediately recognize the building due to its rather unique square shape.
I'm going to be offline for the next 8 hours, so I'm adding another picture I took from balcony of my rented apartment on New Year's eve, with the building in the original picture in the bottom right.
Well, it is Germany, but not Hamburg. And staying with night shots, here's the next picture. This one was taken from the same location (my balcony) as the second one, but looking 90 degrees counterclockwise.
It is indeed Frankfurt am Main (the only real skyline in Germany, we call it "Mainhattan"). The building in the 2 first pictures is called "The Cube" and is the home of the German Stock Exchange in a Frankfurt suburb called Eschborn. I worked as a consultant there for a while and the building is architecturally interesting. It is actually 2 buildings with the space between them enclosed completely and glass crosswalks every other floor; it was designed so that a fire could completely consume one half and wouldn't destroy the other, allowing the business to continue. Walking from one side to the other on the 20th floor is not for those with vertigo, although the crosswalks are fully enclosed, they are mainly made of glass! I had colleagues who would take the elevator down to the ground floor, walk across to the other side and take the elevator up - just to go to another office on the same floor...
Méribel, France? Somehow that picture looks european; and the ski resorts I've been to in the USA have all been in the bottom of the valley rather than up on the hill. And those hills on the other side look like the Alps.
Zanshin closest so far. Some clues as I'll be disappearing for 24 hours or so pretty soon.
Correct country and not that far away as the crow flies. A fair distance though by the time you've gone down one mountain, along a valley floor and up the other side. Probably equates pretty much to one mountain stage of the Tour de France.
Have to speed this up... This place pioneered a ski tuition system whereby you started on skis 1 metre long, skiing parallel from the beginning, no snowplough turns, then you progressed after a couple of days to 1.3 m, then 1.6 after a few more days. You only went to longer skis if you were tall/heavy.
Wrong country Ellen. Zanshin's earlier guess of Meribel wasn't very far away. Head North East from Meribel, pretty much north from Val d'Isere, there is a TGV railway station in the town at the bottom of the mountain. A massive ski area when you look at it on Google maps. Google allowed.