Museum für Gestaltung Zürich

Museum für Gestaltung Zurich Toni-Areal, collection archives of the poster collection, © Valentin Jeck, EM2N
Museum für Gestaltung Zurich Toni-Areal, collection archives of the poster collection, © Valentin Jeck, EM2N

«If you want your publication to be sold in the MoMA bookshop, you should work together with the Museum für Gestaltung.» Christian Brändle (CB), director of the Museum für Gestaltung, and Roman Aebersold (RA), deputy director, discuss everyday museum research and the inexhaustible possibilities that the Museum’s holdings offer researchers.

Research in Everyday Museum Life

CB: Our research at the Museum — as well as our research in general — involves focusing on a particular subject, researching and reappraising it, sharpening it and make it understandable. This is definitely a very exciting aspect of our curatorial work and part of our daily work.

RA: Doing research in everyday museum life is essentially defined by the International Council of Museums (ICOM). It is part of museum activity and supports preservation, exhibition and outreach. Research must be a matter of course in all these areas. New objects are added to our collection every day. We describe and determine their provenance, what material an object is made of, where it was printed or produced, whom and what context it comes from. This is partly routine work, but also involves research.

CB: We don’t just receive objects and materials that we classify, photograph, inventory, contextualise, describe and put online. We also support PhD researchers or SNSF projects in more comprehensively questioning and embedding the material they are exploring. We invest a lot of time in laying the groundwork so that researchers can investigate certain topics and objects — in other words, we gather and assemble knowledge. This means reading, re-reading and communicating in different dimensions for different interest groups.

The Researcher in Collection Programme

RA: We initiated the Researcher in Collection programme to strengthen research at the Museum. The programme is aimed at institutions or individuals interested in a particular area or topic and who want to build on our preliminary research. Concretely, they can access and sift through objects, and receive advice on how they might pursue their research. While our research generates no income, we undertake the preliminary work and provide the infrastructure and workplaces for interested researchers.

The Museum in the University Context

RA: A fine example of our role in the university context is the SNSF research project «Willy Guhl: Thinking with your hands», which we are currently working on with ZHdK’s Research Focus in Aesthetics. There is a wonderful material basis, from Willy Guhl and his family, including objects, models, notes, sketches, correspondence, photographs and lots of other material that has already been reviewed and prepared for use as part of a joint project with Dieter Mersch[1]. This is precisely the bridge between processing archival material and creating the basis for an exhibition or broader outreach.

CB: We have a special situation at ZHdK. Although the Museum für Gestaltung is part of the university as an institution, it is not part of the university of applied sciences. Thus we are not entitled to apply for research funding ourselves. Accordingly, there is no strategic link between the existing research and institute landscape and the Museum. I think we need to demonstrate our openness even more and create accessibility. But we also need to show teaching and research that design history can and must play a greater role for both institutions. In the mid term, it would be exciting if, for example, a chair of design history were established that aspired to and were mandated to convey the knowledge from our archives into teaching.

RA: We receive rather few concrete inquiries from the research community or from researchers, although we are open to their interests. Basically, it is important that researchers recognise the potential that we as a museum have for their work. This opportunity still remains unused: ZHdK is one of the few universities in Europe that has a collection like ours «in-house».

Untapped Potential

CB: Last year, we took several initiatives to open up latent research topics or a research corpus. In this way, we intend to show how much has already been inventoried and where deeper exploration is worthwhile. Similarly, we have formulated possible research topics for collection holdings that have already been documented and are waiting to be researched. These holdings range from designs from the 1930s to the 1970s for the Switzerland Tourism (formerly: Schweizerische Verkehrszentrale SVZ) through the estate of the designer and artist Andreas Christen to the collection of the designer Hans-Rudolf Lutz, who collected around 15,000 pictograms on transport packaging from all over the world.

RA: Our archive houses around 580,000 objects that could be used increasingly for research projects. The role of research outside the Museum is certainly to thicken matters, but also to define new content-related topics. Of course, some research topics relate less to content than to structures, management or material. Archival objects help to understand visual and material culture, locally and internationally. That can also be very exciting for researchers.

CB: Generally, I would very much like our work to assume a research dimension. On the one hand, this would result in exhibitions or publications and, on the other, in concrete research projects. The Museum offers very good conditions, because topics, materials, possibilities and infrastructure are already available. And it serves as a multiplier. For instance, the findings of the research project «Sophie Taeuber-Arp publishing project», conducted at ZHdK in association with the Museum, have been incorporated into exhibitions at the Tate Modern in London, in Basel and currently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

RA: In addition, the objects in our collection are almost always physically available and documented in databases. Over 110,000 objects are already online in our eMuseum, our digital archive. Our outreach activities involve disseminating knowledge in the form of exhibitions and publications as well as creating various educational offerings such as workshops or guided tours. We establish connections between related and well documented topics and also offer guided tours of our archives. These are all good conditions for researchers.

CB: We took a big step last year: The Museum für Gestaltung will receive funding from the Federal Office of Culture for an initial period of four years starting in 2023. We have agreed with the board to also invest funds in research. This is a decisive turning point. Arguably, it is now or never. This is our chance to integrate research into the work of the Museum für Gestaltung long-term.

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[1] Prof. Dr. em. Dieter Mersch, former head of the Research Focus in Aesthetics.

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