Museum Bellpark puts Swiss suburbs in the spotlight

Museum Bellpark in Kriens, a municipality in the Swiss canton of Lucerne, is focusing on suburban communities in an exhibition that reconsiders places often dismissed as lacking distinctive qualities, SRF reported.

Swiss suburbs are frequently regarded as unattractive and overshadowed by urban centres. Yet 74 percent of the country’s population, or 6.7 million people, lives in an agglomeration. The Federal Statistical Office includes core cities in its definition of agglomerations.

Hilar Stadler, who has led Museum Bellpark since 1996, became interested in the tension between places that are neither fully urban nor rural. The museum, located in a typical suburban municipality, is now turning its attention to the surrounding communities with the exhibition “Places without distinctive qualities.”

Reassessing overlooked communities

The exhibition draws on images from the Swiss inventory of worthy sites of national importance, known as ISOS. The inventory was created from 1973 onwards to identify and preserve idyllic villages and picturesque medieval towns.

Suburban municipalities were largely treated as deficit areas that did not merit special attention. “Around 6,000 sites were examined at the time, and 1,200 were classified as worthy sites of national importance,” Stadler said. “The chaff was separated from the wheat. Suburban municipalities were the former.”

Museum Bellpark is showing ISOS images of Emmen, Emmenbrücke, Horw and Kriens. Although the black-and-white photographs were taken only in 1981, they evoke a seemingly distant past. Each image in the inventory is accompanied by a plan and a written description.

Kriens grows from village to city

Kriens illustrates the transformation of suburban municipalities. In 1920, it had just over 7,200 residents. Today, it has more than 30,000 and is the third-largest municipality in the canton of Lucerne. Since 2019, Kriens has officially also been a city.

“Today, the suburbs are where the city is expanded and where housing is built that the city can no longer provide,” Stadler said. He said it was important for suburban communities to develop their own identity, and that the exhibition aimed to contribute to this process.

Museum director receives national award

The exhibition reflects Stadler’s approach of using local subjects to attract interest from beyond the region. It offers local visitors a view of Kriens’ history while the museum’s unconventional exhibitions on art, architecture and photography draw audiences from across Switzerland.

Museum Bellpark is housed in a former manufacturer’s villa. This summer, Stadler received the Meret Oppenheim Prize from the Swiss Federal Office of Culture, an award worth 40,000 Swiss francs.

“Stadler is distinguished by bold exhibitions on unexpected subjects,” the office said in its citation. “He looks at the seemingly everyday and places historical artefacts in contemporary contexts.” Examples include the first Swiss motorway sections and brutalist buildings from around the world.

For Stadler, the prize was “a wonderful recognition of the work I have done”. He said the museum had always sought to look beyond its immediate surroundings.