The museum

The building designed by Mario Botta encompasses Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s home, making the latter an integral part of the Centre Dürrenmatt inaugurated in 2000. The CDN exists in order to bring together, preserve and promote Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s artistic oeuvre. It is intended to be a lively venue open to all.

In designing the Centre Dürrenmatt Neuchâtel, Mario Botta had two guiding principles: he wanted to keep in mind the institution’s purpose, namely to present and showcase Dürrenmatt’s oeuvre, and he sought to make the most of certain site-specific landscape features. Botta’s elegant solution to the restrictions imposed by the site’s topography was to create a large, curving exhibition room that fits into the slope under Dürrenmatt’s existing house. Each of the architectural elements — the entrance tower, the staircases on four levels opening vistas in depth, and the large exhibition room within the “belly of the earth” — all bring to mind the constructions that are omnipresent in Dürrenmatt’s writings: the towers, the cavernous spaces and the labyrinths.

Mario Botta was born in Mendrisio in 1943. After serving an apprenticeship as a technical draughtsman, he went on to study architecture in Venice. His encounters with both Le Corbusier and Louis I. Kahn marked him deeply. He founded his own architectural firm in Lugano in 1970. During this same period, he was a guest professor at several schools of architecture, like the EPF in Lausanne, the Yale School of Architecture in New Haven (USA) and, as one of its co-founders, the Accademia di Architettura of Mendrisio in Italy. A key figure in what is known as the Ticino School (1960/70s movement in architecture), Botta is the recipient of numerous awards. In the over 300 buildings he has designed to date, he has developed a highly personal and rational style based on a resolutely sober idiom, and with an eye to encouraging dialogue between his buildings, the landscape of a site and its history.

Das CDN arbeitet regelmässig mit Zivildienstleistenden. Wenn Sie das unten aufgeführte Pflichtenheft interessiert, zögern Sie nicht, uns zu kontaktieren, um die Einzelheiten zu klären.

Madeleine Betschart hat das Centre Dürrenmatt Neuchâtel vom Dezember 2014 bis zum Dezember 2025 geleitet.