The Museum Bellerive was established in 1968 in order to preserve and conserve the object collection of the Applied Arts Museum of the City of Zürich, whilst expanding it and making it accessible to the public. The name “Museum Bellerive” is derived from the magnificent location on the lake and the immediately neighbouring axis of traffic, the Bellerivestrasse. Out of the collection of examples of commercial production founded in 1875, there soon developed a collection of models for instruction at the vocational school. This later ... Read more

The Museum Bellerive was established in 1968 in order to preserve and conserve the object collection of the Applied Arts Museum of the City of Zürich, whilst expanding it and making it accessible to the public. The name “Museum Bellerive” is derived from the magnificent location on the lake and the immediately neighbouring axis of traffic, the Bellerivestrasse. Out of the collection of examples of commercial production founded in 1875, there soon developed a collection of models for instruction at the vocational school. This later became the School of Applied Arts, where materials, techniques and historical styles were studied. Since the turn of the twentieth century, a period of time during which art handicrafts displayed a unique blossoming in Jugendstil and ArtNouveau, special emphasis was placed upon the new acquisition of contemporary works for the collection. Since no building of its own was available, the Applied Arts Museum, as it was still called at that time, was housed in the Swiss National Museum until the beginning of the 1930s. Both the School of Applied Art and the Museum acquired a new building on Austellungstrasse in 1933. The predomination of current special exhibitions in the new building and the constant expansion of the collection resulted in the Museum’s objects being put into storage again. A temporary solution to the space problem was then found in a former villa on the lakeside promenade.