Our design for Bad Ragaz Art Museum emerges as a living, breathing infrastructure that challenges traditional museum paradigms by transforming exhibition into a dynamic, landscape-based experience. Here, art is interacted with as a continuous dialogue between human experience, architectural form, and natural environments.

This plan proposes a contemporary interpretation of collective cultural experience. The museum becomes a series of interconnected public spaces, where sculpture, performance, and architectural form merge into a garden of gardens as a singular, fluid entity.

The research began with the region surrounding the site — with the Tamina river and its bridge, the Kurpark, and the Grand Resort that has drawn visitors to these springs for centuries. We looked at the Swiss vernacular of public gathering at every scale. Abbeys and monastic cloisters organised as communal centres, the village square and its Dorfbrunnen, the long transformation of public space from communal well to civic square, Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities, each unified by their choreography of shared ground.

We studied the alpine landscape as a generative medium in its own right — its stone formations and springs, and the historic Bisses water-management systems, in which entire communities held tenure over a shared irrigation channel. These are structures built around concepts of collective use, and they became a founding reference for a museum conceived as shared ground.

Four ideas hold the design together —

Expanded Exhibition Territories propose a porous environmental integration — a new topography in which the museum's programme spills into the park rather than sealing itself off from it.

Active Landscape treats the ground itself as a multidimensional social platform, a gathering surface based upon the design of a majlis, where visitors assemble around artworks.

Geological Formations describe a stratified, emergent materiality — extended green roofscapes and terraces that read as an outgrowth of the site's geology.

Material Phenomenology is where springs, cast glass and stone meet. Light, water and material are treated as active participants in the experience of the museum.