Gull’s great opportunity – the state museum

In 1898, Gustav Gull (1858–1942) was the best known and most influential architect in the city of Zurich. With the Swiss National Museum he completed a great building of national importance and international stature. At the same time, as city architect, he was able to start building the current city hall. With the design of the Rijksmuseum in 1890, he laid the cornerstone of his remarkable career as an architect.

By chance, Gull was given the unique opportunity to create the design for Zurich’s application for the museum’s seat with the federal government. Shortly before the deadline, the initiative committee for a state museum in Zurich missed a project for the museum building. The city provided an excellent building site: the promenade surrounded by the rivers Limmat and Sihl, where in 1883 the industrial hall of the Swiss National Exhibition had stood.

The historic rooms in particular were of interest to the initiators of a state museum in Zurich. The influential Zurich art historian Johann Rudolf Rahn recognized the arts and crafts in Schweizer Stuben as a specifically national artistic expression. In doing so, he shaped the purchasing policy of the future Rijksmuseum.

Although the federal government initially did not want to anticipate the establishment of a national museum, since 1887 it has purchased a number of historical pieces of furniture from the 15th to the 17th century. In a bid for the location of the museum, Zurich offered the famously beautiful room of the old silk courtyard and two rooms of the abbess’ courtyard of the former Fraumünster monastery as supplements.

The initiators of a state museum in Zurich did not want a ‘museum case’, but a building that matched the historic spaces. However, two renowned architects from their circle – Alfred Friedrich Bluntschli and Albert Müller – rejected the design assignment. Possibly they saw that they, as representatives of Gottfried Semper neo renaissance could not meet the vague architectural ideas of the initiative committee.

The young architect Hermann Fietz, presumably brokered by Bluntschli and Rahn, then suggested working with Gustav Gull. 1886-1888 Gull had that federal post office realized in Lucerne, but could not build on this first success in Zurich.

Gull seized the unique opportunity. Within a very short time, the two architects succeeded in developing a new type of museum interior. On the drawings, Gull emphasized his role as an author. Fietz left authorship to his older colleague and soon withdrew from the project in favor of his own assignments and work in Bluntschli’s office.

Gull did not design a symmetrical monumental building, but a conglomerate in which the original architectural elements could be integrated organically. He focused on transitional forms from the period between late Gothic and Renaissance in Switzerland. The fact that he was able to break with the Semper tradition was in no small part due to Rahn, who was the first to give an overall picture of the history of art in Switzerland from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.

With Gull’s museum design, the application from the city of Zurich was a resounding success. This is also reflected in the fact that the city of Bern withdrew its museum project during the selection process. She replaced it with one that adopted the architectural forms of Gull’s design—that of today Bern Historical Museum.

In 1895, while the building was still under construction, Gull assumed the position of Zurich’s second City Architect – a position with great power potential. With the establishment of eleven suburbs in 1893, Zurich had become the largest city in Switzerland. The city wanted new administrative buildings that would respond to Zurich’s importance as a large city. In the design of the Rijksmuseum, Gull succeeded in developing an architecture that stood for historical awareness, but also for contemporary reference.

Mayor Hans Pestalozzi served on the initiative committee for a state museum in Zurich and was enthusiastic about Gull’s design skills. Gull was destined for the position of second city architect. However, the fact that the city had decided to transfer the office to him, despite the slow construction progress of the State Museum, led to significant conflicts between the city and the museum authorities.

For this reason, the city initially postponed the planning of the municipal administration buildings until the completion of the Rijksmuseum. During the construction period, Gull built only the school building on Lavaterstrasse, which he designed in the architectural forms of the State Museum. As a result, he fully met the expectations placed on him as city architect.

As the architect of the Landesmuseum, Gull advocated the preservation of historical monuments and the revival of original architectural elements in the museum. At the same time, as city architect, he transformed two historically demanding areas occupied by medieval buildings.

The rooms in the former abbey buildings of the Fraumünster Monastery in the State Museum bear witness to the tension between preservation and renewal that characterizes Gull’s design work as the State Museum architect and town architect: at the official opening of the museum on June 25, 1898, the demolition of the abbey building in full swing. When building the town hall, Gull sought a connection with the design of the national museum and an architectural mediation with the vanished monastic architecture – with success.

When he left the position of second city architect in 1900 to become a professor at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic University, the city had no doubt that this would lead him to design a town house complex on the site of the former monastery of Oetenbach. which had begun in late 1897. It was the most important and largest order of the city of Zurich at the time, from which the current official buildings emerged.