St. Gallen Nature Museum
 St. Gallen Natural History Museum, east view |
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| Data | |
|---|---|
| place | 9016 St. Gallen , Rorschacher Strasse 263, Switzerland |
| Art | |
| architect | Meier Hug Architects together with Armon Semandeni |
| opening | November 11, 2016 |
| Number of visitors (annually) | 90,000 |
| operator |
St. Gallen Nature Museum Foundation
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| management |
Toni Bürgin
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| Website | |
The St. Gallen Nature Museum is a natural history museum in St. Gallen . On an area of 2000 m 2 , it offers access to the local flora and fauna. The new building was opened in 2016 and enables an open exhibition presentation with walk-in room images.
history
The forerunner of today's St. Gallen Natural History Museum is the St. Gall Natural History Museum, which was founded on September 28, 1846 by the local community of St. Gallen. The museum used an inventory that had previously been kept in the former St. Katharinen high school and monastery in St. Gallen. A comprehensive reorganization and cataloging of this natural history cabinet was carried out in the years 1812/1813 by the founder of the St. Gallen Natural Science Society, Caspar Tobias Zollikofer . The constantly growing collection of natural objects was stored in various urban objects from 1819 to 1877, for example from 1855 in the west wing of the newly founded object known today as the canton school on the Brühl. When there was finally too little space there for the natural history collection due to the rapidly growing school operations, concrete plans were developed from 1871 to build a museum of their own.
The new house at the city park was opened as the Old Museum on October 8, 1877 and housed both a nature museum and an art museum. However, in the course of its use, serious structural deficiencies soon emerged, which were due to a lack of financial resources for the construction. The house had to be closed in 1971 for security reasons.
In 1979 the two museums became the property of the “St. Gallen Museums Foundation”. The so-called “Kirchhoferhaus an der Museumsstrasse”, which was founded in 1911 at the suggestion of Emil Bächler as a “Natural History Museum” and was supposed to house his archaeological finds from the Wildkirchli, was also part of this association. After the Altes Museum was temporarily closed in 1971, a large part of the natural history collection was housed in the basement of the Kirchhoferhaus. The Altes Museum was reopened in September 1987 after extensive restoration.
The increasing number of visitors to the Altes Museum, as well as the rapidly expanding natural history collection as well as cultural and political considerations about the location, prompted the city of St. Gallen to build a new nature museum near the St. Gallen Botanical Garden . After an architecture competition, the house was opened on November 10, 2016 after two and a half years of construction.
The curators of the nature museum
- 1846–1873 Jacob Wartmann
- 1873–1902 Friedrich Bernhard Wartmann
- 1902–1949 Emil Bächler
- 1949–1968 Friedrich Saxer
- 1985-1993 Hans Heierli
- 1993–1996 Heinrich Haller
- from 1997 Toni Bürgin
collection
The extensive collection of the nature museum consists of rocks (50,000 individual specimens), a mineral collection (around 7,000 specimens), fossils (25,000 objects), 500 prehistoric objects, 100,000 plant specimens and an extensive collection of animals. The most famous objects include a Nile crocodile from 1623 and an almost complete skeleton of an anatosaur . The museum also has the largest collection of preparations made by Ernst Friedrich Zollikofer . Part of the collection has been processed and is available for scientific purposes.
Exhibitions
The museum has an exhibition area of 2000 square meters, the rooms spread over three floors have daylight throughout.
The permanent exhibition is divided into seven thematic areas with the following focal points: (1) a historical overview of the history of the house with the famous Nile crocodile from the 17th century, the core of the collection that was created in the following years; (2) a landscape relief of the cantons of St. Gallen and Appenzell; (3) the representation of the evolutionary history of life on earth with numerous prehistoric objects, including numerous dinosaurs; (4) a presentation of minerals from Eastern Switzerland; (5) a room dedicated to the bears and the related finds by Emil Bächler ; (6) the preparation of the topic of nature as a model for technical innovation and (7) the topic of nature and available raw materials.
In addition, special exhibitions are shown several times a year . In 2017 these were the exhibitions We eat the world and overwinter , in 2018 the annual special exhibition All sorts of things to do with eggs , fossils in Alpstein and from November Grimm's animal life on animals in fairy tales.
On the ground floor of the building, where the exhibits on the history of the house are shown, there is a small museum shop and a cafeteria with an outside terrace in the park.
The museum park, which was newly opened in May 2018, on the area of the museum building, the parish church of St. Maria Neudorf and the botanical garden of the city of St. Gallen, offers another space for discovery with its planting and the exhibited boulders and casts of fossils. Thematic cooperation between the three neighboring institutions is being considered. Thematic tours and the youth laboratory as an experiment room are offered for schools. In addition, there are afternoons of experiments on specific topics for children and young people on the program.
Web links
- Website of the Nature Museum St. Gallen
- Leader Special: Special edition on the new nature museum in St. Gallen ( pdf ).
- Interview with museum director Toni Bürgin: "It is important to us that people understand the context" In: Strings. Eastern Switzerland culture magazine.
Individual evidence
- ^ Hans Heierli: History of the Nature Museum St. Gallen. Retrieved July 10, 2017 .
- ^ Toni Bürgin and Josef Barandun: Nature Museum St. Gallen. Collected nature - yesterday, today, tomorrow. Retrieved July 11, 2017 .
- ↑ Reto Voneschen: The Nile crocodile in the cafeteria. Tagblatt, November 14, 2016, accessed on July 29, 2017 .
- ↑ St. Gallen Nature Museum. Exhibition. In: Homepage of the Nature Museum St. Gallen. Retrieved July 10, 2017 .
Coordinates: 47 ° 26 '22.2 " N , 9 ° 24' 31.8" E ; CH1903: seven hundred and forty-eight thousand six hundred and five / 256 165