Among young Spanish practices, the studio set up in Barcelona in 2004 by Fabrizio Barozzi and Alberto Veiga is one of those that have most gone international, and the recently finished Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland, is the largest of three museums planned around a square located in an old railway zone that has become an altogether new cultural district for the city.

This is a large container positioned beside the train tracks and presenting two long elevations of very different nature. A hermetic facade executed with gray bricks has absorbed a preexisting construction and evokes the industrial past of the site. The more permeable one opens out to the new square, taking on the role of a civic gate into the art museum.

This institution in Lausanne is the fourth commission that the architectural firm Barozzi Veiga has landed outside Spain, joining the new home of the Mieczys?aw Kar?owicz Philharmonic Orchestra in Szczecin (Poland), winner in the year 2015 of the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture, also known as the Mies van der Rohe Award; the enlargement of the Bündner Kunstmuseum in Chur (Switzerland); the Bruneck Music School in Brunico (Italy); and the Tanzhaus of Zurich (Switzerland), still at design stage.