Twelve years after he won the design competition, David Chipperfield has completed a new building for Zurich’s Kunsthaus, making it Switzerland’s biggest art museum.

The 21m tall freestanding building is almost twice the height of the original museum building which it faces across a square in the old town. Together the two buildings – which are linked by a subterranean passage not unlike Chipperfield’s 2018 route linking two buildings at the Royal Academy in London – define this square, said the architect.

The square, Heimplatz, is known locally as the Peacock, a moniker adopted by a group that successfully campaigned to have Chipperfield’s proposals shrunk, using Switzerland’s uber-democratic planning system.

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