I wake inside a wall. It is one lift of concrete made with crushed Jura limestone, rammed by hand onto the lift below, and then the next lift rammed onto me. Every band on my face is a day of somebody’s arms. metalocus describes my walls as “rammed-concrete walls made with locally sourced Jura limestone aggregate”, built in successive layers.

I am the Wyss Museum, the largest of three new buildings by Atelier Peter Zumthor of Haldenstein for the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen. My preview opened on 26 September 2026. On 6 November, Christophe Catsaros published the first close Swiss technical reading of my walls in espazium/TRACÉS.

A plan that bends for older residents

My Y-shaped plan was not drawn on an empty sheet. It was laid out around a ginkgo, a sequoia and a group of plane trees that stood here long before me, as designboom records. I hold about 1,500 m² of exhibition space on three floors, on a footprint of roughly 890 m². Across the ensemble, the Fondation’s gallery area grows by about 39 %. Zumthor told designboom why there are three houses instead of one: “I like art museums that really only serve art, so I split up the different functions.”

Humans who build to last have always known this: you settle with the land, not on top of it. When Star Wars needed a home for a farm boy on Tatooine, the crew filmed in the sunken courtyards of Matmata in Tunisia, a house that already belonged to its ground. I feel some kinship with it.

The honest anatomy

Catsaros writes that my rammed face is “en réalité un double mur”, that inside “il s’agit d’une structure en béton traditionnelle”, and that I share “le même socle en béton” with the Erlen Torhaus, the timber-framed gatehouse that houses offices and art logistics. Read this as craft logic. The rammed skin is free to be layered, tactile and made of one stone because a conventional core carries the loads, the services and the stable climate a collection needs. That core is the structural work of Schnetzer Puskas Ingenieure, with BWS Bauphysik on building physics and Rapp Architekten running construction. The trade-off is plain: a double wall buys the monolith and modern performance at the price of two wall systems to build, coordinate and one day maintain. The same stone continues through me as terrazzo, ceiling aggregate, mineral wall finishes, benches and solid stairs.

Building-sense: I feel myself in layers. The rammed skin ages with weather and hands, while the core stays steady. My lift lines are my memory of how I was made, and a building that keeps that record can be repaired one lift at a time.

←TODAY: In Riehen in 2026, a museum façade records hand-rammed lifts over a conventional concrete core.
→3012: Zurich-3012 buildings read their lift lines like tree rings, and every repair is indexed to the layer it touches.
Fulcrum: Construction sequence is information, and only a model that keeps it lets the future maintain what the present built.

Oak, cherry and a villa for the park

Next to me stands the Ammann Pavilion. Wallpaper’s Ellie Stathaki describes a main frame of oak, a wrapping of glazing, floors and walls lined in cherry, and pear-wood handles. It covers about 640 m² on one storey, serves as a free lounge by day and holds up to 250 people at night. Lauber Ingenieure engineered the timber. espazium puts the total at about CHF 120 million, covering land, construction and the first years of operation. Construction started in 2022 and the buildings were handed over in 2026. Director Sam Keller says: “We want to learn from the visitors themselves, to optimise all our processes.”

Atelier: Most Swiss offices detailing in-situ walls draw a finished surface and lose the sequence that made it. From the late 2070s I can tell you: the walls that aged well kept a legible record of their layers. Monday move: add a “lift” layer to your Rhino and Archicad templates, and require every wall built in lifts to be modelled as stacked, named lifts.

Hack: Build a rammed wall as the stack of lifts it really is, so the façade drawing carries the construction order. Run this in Rhino’s Python editor. Each lift becomes its own closed box with its own height, and its name records both its order and its height. Swap the sample heights for your own lift log.

import rhinoscriptsyntax as rs
L, T, z = rs.GetReal('Wall length'), rs.GetReal('Wall depth'), 0.0
for i, h in enumerate([0.12, 0.10, 0.14, 0.11]):  # sample lift heights, m
    b = rs.AddBox([(0,0,z),(L,0,z),(L,T,z),(0,T,z),(0,0,z+h),(L,0,z+h),(L,T,z+h),(0,T,z+h)])
    rs.ObjectName(b, 'lift_%02d_h%.2f' % (i, h)); z += h

My doors open daily from 15 January 2027. Come before then if you can, put your palm on a lift line, and then draw your next wall the way it will be built.