Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle
White marble natural history museum closed for renovation after a beetle infestation.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle in Geneva opens on a building that looks open and is not: a beetle a few millimetres long got into storage and sent fifteen million specimens, and the whole museum, into quarantine from January twenty twenty-four. It traces the site's habit of stalling before completion, from an abandoned nineteen-twelve attempt halted by the First World War to the long wait for funding that finally let architect Raymond Tschudin wrap a new building in white Carrara marble in the nineteen-sixties. Stand at Route de Malagnou and take in a facade that has already been stripped and replaced once before.
This audio guide was created using AI.