Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Entrance

Welcome to this walk which will take you from the Museum für Gestaltung to the Swiss National Museum. We’d like to show you a few historic places connected with the two museums and with the path between them. We start under the projecting roof sheltering the entrance of the Museum für Gestaltung.
The open space under the jutting roof, the massive pillars and the entrance itself, with its steel-framed glass panes reaching down to the ground speak a clear language. The building is a typical example of the “Neues Bauen”, the beginning of modern architecture, which started in the mid 1920s. The complex was designed by the two Zurich architects Adolf Steger and Karl Egender and opened in 1933. It housed the Kunstgewerbeschule – the School of Arts and Crafts – and vocational schools as well as the Gewerbemuseum – the craft museum – which is now the Museum für Gestaltung.
In 2014 the museum and the former Kunstgewerbeschule – which by then was part of the Zurich University of the Arts – moved into the newly opened “Toni-Areal”. The building here was closed for several years for renovation, and reopened in 2018. The Museum für Gestaltung moved back in, while the University of the Arts remained in the Toni-Areal. But the history of the museum is older than this building. The Gewerbemuseum was founded back in 1875 and before it came here it was housed for decades in the Swiss National Museum, along with the Kunstgewerbeschule. Exactly where it was we’ll show you at the end of this walk.