Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Gardens

You are in the garden of the Museum für Gestaltung, which opened in 1933. We’ll go into more details about this building at the next stop. Here we want to consider the gardens. They were an integral part of the plan. This way of integrating the exterior space into the architecture of buildings is also typical of “Neues Bauen”, the beginning of modern architecture, which started in the mid 1920s. The garden was designed by the Zurich landscape architect Gustav Ammann. Ammann worked with many well-known Swiss architects, and liked to do so. For example, he collaborated with Max Frisch on the famous Letzigraben swimming pool, now called the Max Frisch pool. In 1939 Ammann was the chief garden designer for the Swiss National Exhibition, or Landi 39.