ZAZ Bellerive: Touch Wood Exhibit

The first floor has two main exhibits, one on wood technology which I thought had a lot of potential. It showed how wood is being used today as an innovative building material, like how wood can be bent into shape and glued together. And you could touch everything which was cool.

It really left me wanting more though, I wanted to know a lot more details about the specific technologies and how they fit into making a building. I would’ve also liked to learn how wood can replace metal or concrete in buildings but they didn’t really cover that.

Everything was in German, so that might be a turn-off for the English monolinguals among us (me). Fortunately for me Sev could translate everything.

The other exhibit on the first floor included a bunch of models of wooden buildings currently in Switzerland, including a few I could immediately recognize. I thought this was really neat.

Upstairs were a few more rooms: one with different tree rings, one with an informational board about the benefits of wood construction compared to steel and concrete, and one artsy exhibit where some researchers recorded the growth of trees and made music out of the growth data. I wasn’t really into that one.

In the backyard there’s a few large wooden structures you can climb in, one is of a giant whale. I thought that was pretty cool, and you can access this area without a ticket. At least I think so? No one was there to check them.

Overall it was too short and light on details to be worth 10 CHF (about $10) so I’m going to give this 2 snacks. If you don’t speak German or go with someone who does, it really would not be worth it at all. But the backyard part is free (?) and worth a look if you’re in the area! It seemed like there was a place to order snacks but it wasn't open when we were there.

This is a rotating exhibit so I'm curious to see what this museum might have in the future.