Museum Bellerive

I visited this tiny little exhibit last Thurs. Basically, it’s a collection of architectural bits and pieces from the 19th century. I do mean bits and pieces quite literally; the main room on the ground floor is comprised of a few racks with mostly organized piles of things, from the locking mechanisms on doors, to the tiny little hinged figure-heads that prop the shutters open. (In Zürich, just about all the windows on all the buildings have shutters. And they are all held open by these little busts. Strangely enough, I haven’t taken a picture of any.) Here’s an image of the main room’s collections. Yes, it even includes quite a few kitchen sinks.

Other offshoot rooms featured elements such as wallpaper (extant pieces, sample books, even wood blocks for printing the patterns) or fancy wood inlay work. The picture at the head of this post is a detail from a panel that, beyond appearing three-dimensional due to the differently coloured pieces of wood, also included chunks of mirror to further confuse the eye. Made by Trix & Robert Haussmann, it’s called Türpaneel und Raumgitter (1980).

If you go, the exhibit may well be different: according to the cryptic blurb in my guidebook, the museum “displays its permanent collection in the form of a continuous programme of temporary exhibitions”. So essentially, they have a ton of stuff in storage and they rotate their way through it to make sure every piece of old house-bits gets its due time in the limelight. Or, at least time in another pile, but on a different set of shelves.