Exhibition

Collection Highlights

Current
Ausstellungsstrasse
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The leading Swiss museum for design and visual communication presents the treasures of its internationally renowned collection. For example, Max Bill’s Ulmer Hocker meets Albrecht Dürer’s Apocalypse of 1498, Adrian Frutiger’s Univers typeface a Balenciaga cocktail dress. Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s marionettes dance around the SBB station clock while Emile Gallé’s art nouveau vase finds a companion in one of El Lissitzky’s lithographs. The museum has built up its collections over the past 150 years and today holds more than half a million objects ranging across the arts and crafts, graphics, posters, textiles, furniture and product design. 2,000 collection highlights enable visitors to discover the world of beautiful, useful, and curious everyday objects in the basement exhibition at Ausstellungsstrasse.

eGuide
Taxile Doat / Emil Decoeur, pumpking vases, around 1900, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Decorative Arts Collection and Sigg hot water bottles, 1925, SIGG AG, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Design Collection

Use the new eGuide to explore the design- and graphic highlights at our main site on Ausstellungsstrasse! The fully virtual eGuide offers background information and stories – in images and texts, videos and sound – on more than 200 collectibles present in the exhibitions Collection Highlights, Ideal Living, Poster Stories and the Swiss Design Lounge. Also available are suggestions for thematic tours on various topics for children as well as for adults.

You can use the eGuide free of charge on your own smartphone or borrow one of our devices during your visit at the site Ausstellungsstrasse.

eGuide

Exhibition view
About the Exhibition

«We're displaying the exhibits in thematic groups in the drawers and showcases. On top, though, on the exhibition island – what we call a table cracker – we let them make contact, detached from their value, origin, era, or function. They seem to like it because they look even more beautiful to me than among themselves in the archive.»

Renate Menzi, Curator Design Collection

«The unusual form of presentation may surprise visitors at first. While no compelling connection exists in terms of content, similar objects nevertheless stand side by side, while colors playfully interact, capturing comparable structures and revealing the identity of our unique museum collection as visitors roam and discover its highlights.»

Sabine Flaschberger, Curator Decorative Arts Collection

«Our museum has been collecting design, graphics, posters, and decorative arts since 1875. It is our generation’s privilege to finally make these treasures accessible to a wider public. Immerse yourself in a treasure trove rife with surprises, from the unknown disposable product to the international top-of-the-range piece.»

Christian Brändle, Director
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Publication

The designer pack of cards «The Happy Collector» shows 52 objects from the design and decorative arts collection at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, selected by the curators Renate Menzi and Sabine Flaschberger.

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What’s on

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