For over ten years, Lausanne has had the ambition to build a museum centre and thus become a primary cultural destination on a regional, national and international scale. Formerly known by the name of Pôle Muséal, the project is finally entering its phase of active realisation and is now called Platforme10. Gathering the Vaud Canton’s three main museums – the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts (Fine Arts Museum), the Museum of Design and Applied Art (MUDAC), and the Musée de l’Elysée – the new cultural hub will be located on the former ‘halle des locomotives de la gare CFF’ site, next to Lausanne’s train station. This strategic location will help attract a large number of visitors. The Fine Arts Museum will be the first to open its gates. During the construction phase, the three institutions have already begun organising events together.

Gathering art, design and digital media in order to build a cultural hub is also one of the main aims of Basel. Opened in October 2014, the Campus der Künste (Campus for the Arts) brings together in the Dreispitz Area ten different institutes of the FHNW Academy of the Arts, which were previously scattered throughout town and in Muttenz. Formed by four buildings, the main one – called the Hochhaus, and designed by Morger + Dettli Architekten (Basel) – is an industrial looking, forty-seven metre-high structure mainly made of concrete.

The campus is not only an urban site where modern architecture integrates with nature, but is also a cosmopolitan meeting place. It is a centre which brings together the HeK (House of Electronic Arts), the archives and residential building of Herzog + de Meuron, the Atelier Mondial (formerly iaab), Radio X, Schaulager exhibition space (earmarked for the new home of Kunsthaus Baselland) and four hundred creative enterprises are close to one another.

Following the vision that education, research and art should work together above and beyond any frontier, the campus constitutes a platform for creation and experimentation, with a yearly programme of exhibitions, concerts, screenings, artists’ talks, conferences, performances and workshops, in addition to design development and initiatives, and entrepreneurship networking. Musée de l’Elysée and MUDAC at Plateforme10, Lausanne’s key players in artistic studies and creative industries are brought together in order to build knowledge and to encourage young, independently-minded artists to develop their professional career; motivating various new perceptions, visions and understandings.

We can see that there are many differences on cultural, political and economical scales between French and German-speaking parts of Switzerland. As the former promotes a new way of thinking about the conservation of artworks, the museum, public and local funding, the other shows the ambition to develop internationally-oriented education, and entrepreneurial hubs encouraging private supports.