Barcelona-based firm Barozzi Veiga has completed a major new museum in Switzerland, which will open to the public in October 2019.

The goal of the project is to transform an area of Lausanne into a new arts district centred around the city’s three main museums: Fine Arts, Photography and the Museum of Design and Contemporary Applied Arts. All this activity is sited within a very complex urban setting, affected by old railway yards currently in a state of disuse.

As for the urban strategy, the decision to unveil this part of the city and connect it with the Station Square entails sacrificing the 19th-century building that exists on the site to generate a new public space. The idea is for the three new buildings to gravitate around this open space and to be understood as a single entity. The design features a collection of found fragments, incorporating them from the start. The building’s new foyer emerges from the end facade of a former train shed like an objet trouvé. This ultimately becomes the design’s main compositional element from which the museum’s entire programme comes to life.