Tavel House
Fortified medieval mansion of stone and sculpted heads, hiding a vast metal scale model of the vanished walled city.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Tavel House in Geneva follows Auguste Magnin, who in eighteen ninety-six finished eighteen years of quiet work building a vast metal scale model of the medieval walled city he had watched demolished as a boy. It traces back to eighteen forty-nine, when the government voted to tear down Geneva's old fortifications, and forward to eighteen seventy-eight, when Magnin and a team of craftsmen began cutting, hammering and soldering zinc houses and copper roofs street by street. Climb the stairs inside this fortified stone mansion and you stand right above the attic where that vanished city still fills the room.
This audio guide was created using AI.