Palais de Rumine: Lausanne’s Public University and Museum Building
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.6
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- Switzerland
- Primary era
- Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Modern
- Civilizations
- Swiss
- Site type
- Civic
On this page15 sections
History
The Palais de Rumine is a public building in Lausanne, Switzerland, designed in the Florentine Renaissance style and constructed between 1898 and 1906. Built to bring a university, the cantonal library, and museums together in one facility, it stands east of Place de la Riponne at the western edge of Lausanne’s historic centre, below the former academy on the Cité hill.
A bequest and the creation of a university
The building began with the bequest of Gabriel de Rumine, a Lausanne-born civil engineer of Russian origin. When he died in 1871 at the age of 30, he left the city 1.5 million Swiss francs. His instructions required the money to be invested and doubled, then used fifteen years after his death to construct a building for public benefit.
The project was linked to plans to transform the Lausanne Academy, founded in 1537, into a full university. In 1886, a city commission proposed a shared building for the university, the cantonal library, and several museums. The location was debated extensively in 1888, with Mon-Repos, Montbenon, Cité-Dessus, Beaulieu, and Boulevard de Grancy considered before Place de la Riponne was chosen.
Competition, controversy, and construction
An architectural competition opened in September 1889 and attracted 36 proposals. The jury awarded no first prize. The city initially selected the third-place design by Dominique Demierre, but he was disqualified because he worked in the same office as juror Henri-Paul Nénot. The commission ultimately went to Gaspard André, an architect from Lyon.
Political disputes delayed the work. Critics objected to the chosen site, the concentration of several institutions in one building, and the failure to carry out test borings in difficult ground. André’s death in 1896 caused another delay, and responsibility for carrying out his project passed to Louis Bezencenet, Charles Girardet, Francis Isoz, and Charles Melley.
Construction started in 1898 after the buildings occupying the site had been demolished. The palace was completed in 1906 and officially inaugurated on 3 November that year. It had originally been intended to open in 1903 for the centenary of the Canton of Vaud, while its first rooms were occupied only in the following year.
University and museum uses
The new building initially housed university services, including the library, and helped the Lausanne Academy develop into a university. It also provided space for the city’s and canton’s scientific and artistic collections. The Museum of Industrial Art opened there on 12 September 1909, using material from the decorative-arts section of Catherine de Rumine’s industrial museum.
The University of Lausanne remained in the palace until its move to the Dorigny campus, a process that began in the 1970s and was completed around 1980. The building was restructured in the 1980s because the university needed more space. From 1905 to 1967, it also housed the Botanical Museum of Lausanne. After the university’s departure, cultural and administrative institutions continued to use the palace.
The Treaty of Lausanne and later civic roles
The Aula, a large ceremonial and assembly hall, hosted the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne on 24 July 1923. This international settlement defined peace between the Allied powers and Turkey after the First World War, established modern Turkish borders across much of the region, and provided for a population exchange between Greece and Turkey. The signing table was returned to Turkey by Federal Councillor Pascal Couchepin in 2008, and no physical trace of the signing remains in the palace.
After a fire at the Grand Council building, the Palais de Rumine housed the Grand Council, the legislative body of the Canton of Vaud, from 2002 to 2017. The council moved to a new building in the Cité in 2017. Since 2019, the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts has been at Plateforme 10 rather than in the palace.
The palace today
On 1 January 2023, the cantonal geology, zoology, and botany museums merged to form the Cantonal Museum of Natural Sciences, also known as Naturéum. The Palais de Rumine now accommodates one site of the Cantonal and University Library of Lausanne, the Cantonal Museum of Archaeology and History, the coin and medal collection, and the geology and zoology departments of Naturéum.
The Palais de Rumine and the museums housed there are listed as Swiss cultural property of national importance. Its centenary in 2006 was marked by the retrospective exhibition Voyage en Ruminie, organized by institutions that occupied or had formerly occupied the building. In 2018, the joint exhibition COSMOS marked the bicentenary of the Cantonal Museum.
Remains
The Palais de Rumine has a central block with two recessed side wings. The wings contain library and art-museum spaces, while the central section is organized around the Aula and a multi-level circulation system of galleries and ramps. The lower storey and ground floor are faced in rusticated dressed stone and occupy almost half the façade’s height. Various limestones and granites were used in the construction, together with reinforced concrete made according to the Hennebique system, an early method combining concrete with iron reinforcement.
Exterior and architectural composition
The central avant-corps is flanked by two small towers rising above the service staircases. Inspired by the Villa Medici, a Renaissance villa in Rome, the towers end in loggias, or open-sided galleries. The main entrance is formed by a sculpted portal gable with two free-standing columns bearing griffin figures. Lions, angels, and mythological creatures appear elsewhere on the façade.
André omitted the arcade row associated with Florentine Renaissance architecture because the design had to preserve views towards the buildings on the old-town hill and reduce costs. The palace was consequently built one storey lower than first planned. This change altered its proportions, which were considered visually heavy. A small terrace at the southern end of the building, at second-floor level, is called Place Madeleine after the cemetery church dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalene that formerly stood on the site. A monument to Louis Ruchonnet was installed there in 1906.
Central interior spaces
The Aula
The central avant-corps is dominated by the Aula, whose glass roof lights the ceremonial hall. Two lecture halls are situated below it. The ceiling was undecorated at the 1906 inauguration because changes were needed to improve the acoustics. In 1911, State Councillor Camille Decoppet commissioned Louis Rivier, a painter particularly known for decorating Protestant churches in the Canton of Vaud, to complete the decoration.
Rivier worked on the ceiling between 1913 and 1924, creating an iconographic scheme of 41 pictorial components across approximately 1,000 square metres. The imagery combines Christian and secular elements, with a style that partly reflects the Italian Renaissance. A bust of Gabriel de Rumine by the sculptor Raphaël Lugeon stands in a niche in the Aula.
The galleries and atrium
The principal section contains an integrated circulation system of galleries and ramps arranged across several levels. Its main staircase appears larger through a trompe-l’oeil effect, an artistic illusion that makes a surface seem deeper or more monumental than it is. An atrium with a water basin forms part of this interior network of galleries and circulation spaces.
René Auberjonois’s 1933 oil painting Les hommes du port decorates the upper level of the atrium. The atrium, galleries, ramps, and staircase together express the building’s original combination of educational, library, and museum functions.
Sculpture and technical features
Zoology gallery reliefs
Two high-reliefs decorate the gable fields above the doors at the two ends of the zoology gallery. Created by Rodo in 1904, they represent the female allegories of Anatomy and Geography.
Simplon Tunnel gate
A heavy iron gate from the construction of the Simplon Tunnel stands at the base of the northern garden on Rue de l’Université. During the tunnel works, it was used to hold back surging water when flows became too strong for drainage. Brandt, Brandau and Company, the firm responsible for the works, donated the gate to the Canton of Vaud. It was intended for display in the basement but was instead installed outdoors within a masonry arch.
Terrace tree
An incense cedar planted on the terrace after construction had reached 22 metres in height and a trunk circumference of 361 centimetres by 2024.
