The Swiss Open-Air Museum is – finally – getting a schoolhouse – Construction diary schoolhouse Unterheid

The schoolhouse, a four-storey stone building with a slate roof, was built on the alluvial Aare plain in the Haslital valley in 1830. It served as a primary school for the children of the surrounding villages until the 1870s.

We first began drawing up plans to acquire the school building back in 2012. However, the idea of including a schoolhouse at the Swiss Open-Air Museum dates back much further, to around 1970, when the museum was still in the planning stages. The basic concept, back then, was to put together a representative collection of buildings from different rural regions of Switzerland and make them accessible to the public in one location. As well as traditional dwellings and ancillary buildings, the collection was to include the typical public buildings you might find in a traditional village. Naturally, this meant that a schoolhouse was a must. It took over 50 years, but we finally managed to locate and acquire a suitable property.