Agenda

The five towers presented in the exhibition – chosen for their representativeness, their aesthetic qualities and the formal beauty of their archival documents – are the works of five architects who imagined the 21stcentury well before the advent of the year 2000: Jean Tschumi, René Deléchat, Alphonse Laverrière, Hugo Buscaglia and André Gaillard. Whereas the towers were systematically decried during the 20thcentury, today they are the necessary components of a responsible town planning in search of sustainable solutions. The exhibition displays drawings, plans, photographs and an unreleased film of the construction of the Tour d’Ivoire in Montreux (Ivory Tower), as well as some magnificent drawings of Le Corbusier’s skyscraper project for the Marine district in Algiers.

50 000 years of local history in the heart of Europe is the theme of the permanent exhibition at the Laténium. The exhibition presents the different stages of human evolution, from the present day back to the times of the Neanderthal man. The first human beings settling in Switzerland date from 50 000 years ago. Then followed the glacial ambience, 25,000 years of ice age. As human societies started to constitute their first permanent settlements and lake-dwellings. The Celts, the Gallo-Romans and the Middle Ages are the next focus of the presentation.

Traditionally, woodcarving is a male affair, but the number of female woodcarvers is constantly increasing. The exhibition shows selected works by eleven women artists from Switzerland and Southern Germany.