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Swiss homes & furnishings

A living room from around 1970. Individual and unconventional pieces of furniture characterize the room. © Swiss National Museum

Following on from the installation of an exhibition in the museum’s station wing last year, the west wing is also set to host a permanent exhibition: ‘Swiss Furniture and Interiors’. The exhibition presents interiors and furniture from the museum’s own collection. At its core are the reconstructed period rooms that helped establish the museum’s international reputation. Swiss furniture from the 20th century is on display in the spaces in front of the rooms.

The eleven panelled period rooms at the Landesmuseum Zurich were installed in 1898 with a view to presenting Swiss craftsmanship and exemplary home decor. Period rooms are rooms that have been transferred from their original location and reconstructed within a museum. The Landesmuseum Zurich features rooms from, among other places, Fraumünster Abbey and Oetenbach Monastery, as well as a stateroom from the Palazzo Pestalozzi in Castelvetro, the parlour from the Rosenburg house in Stans, the living room from Schloss Wiggen and a reconstructed monastery apothecary. The current presentation focuses on the rooms’ craftsmanship and narrative elements. The new lighting scheme illuminates things which were previously hidden: Amusing fables, white elephants, cheeky nudes, and many an impressive dragon are all there in the Gothic rooms waiting to be discovered. In the Renaissance and Baroque rooms the emphasis has been placed mainly on the theme of wealth and representation. In the bourgeois residences of the 20th century, wealth and status are revealed less by a room’s architecture than by the furniture it contains. People are prepared to spend money on artistically crafted individual pieces of furniture made from the finest tropical wood, or to decorate their homes with design icons. The exhibition ‘Swiss Furniture and Interiors’ makes it clear that people’s needs  appear to have remained the same from the Middle Ages to the modern-day apartment. It is merely the furniture and rooms that are adapted to the prevailing conditions.


Scenography: atelier oï-sa, La Neuveville

Publication accompanying the exhibition: pocket guide ‘Swiss Furniture and Interiors’. A guide to the exhibition with examples of exhibits. 84 pp., in colour and with numerous illustrations, available in German, English, French and Italian. CHF 5.00

Period room from Fraumünster Abbey in Zurich, built in 1489 by Cäcilia Helfenstein. © Swiss National Museum

Useable living room with contemporary furniture supplied by Swiss manufacturers and designers. © Swiss National Museum

Garden chair, 1945, Willy Guhl, Eternit. © Swiss National Museum

History of Switzerland

Renewal of the mercenary alliance between Louis XIV and emissaries of the Swiss Confederation in Paris, 1663 (detail). Tapestry. © Swiss National Museum

«HISTORY OF SWITZERLAND» reveals Swiss history from the earliest times to the present day, looking at four thematic areas. The first section shows the history of migration and settlement, the second examines religious and intellectual history, in the third Swiss political history is looked at and the fourth section focusses on the economic develop-ment of the country.

Celestial globe by Jost Bürgi, 1594. © Swiss National Museum

«COLLECTIONS GALLERY» offers for the first time a representative overview of our own collections. Twenty displays show craft products of the highest quality. The Swiss National Museum possess more than 820,000 objects, the largest collection covering cultural history and Swiss handicraft.

Arms and Clothing

The Armoury Tower

Exhibition in so-called Armoury Tower

The Swiss National Museum’s collection of arms, of both national and international significance, is based on the contents of the old Zurich Armoury. The collection on view in the Armoury Tower is grouped thematically, encompassing everything from such Mediaeval equipment as upper-body armour and jousting helmets from Gesslerburg in Küssnacht, canton of Schwyz, to Baroque ceremonial and status pieces and Swiss Army uniforms of the 19th and 20th centuries. The various types of weapons, uniforms and equipment are shown and explained in their historical context.

Costumes and traditional garb

Detail of a gentleman’s waistcoat, around 1800

The Swiss National Museum houses Switzerland’s largest collection of costumes and traditional garments, including ladies’, men’s and children’s clothing from the 18th to the 21st centuries. Its assortment of decorative textiles, in particular embroidery on linen, is also one of a kind in Switzerland. The collection has profited especially from the fact that the National Museum Zurich recognised the significance of costumes and textiles relatively early on, which means that a large proportion of the 18th-century costumes derives from a collection started by the National Museum Zurichs’s first director, Heinrich Angst.

(in German)
Sonderheft "Sanierung Schweizerisches Landesmuseum" von TEC21, der Fachzeitschrift für Architektur, Ingenieurwesen und Umwelt.
www.tec21.ch