Building · Old Town
Luxembourg City Museum
A thousand years of city history inside four restored townhouses, with a glass lift that descends past the bare rock the city was built on.
From the street this looks like four old houses with a sheet of glass behind them, which is more or less exactly what it is. They date from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century and still carry medieval stonework inside. The museum opened on the 22nd of June 1996, designed by the Luxembourg architect Conny Lentz with the Paris studio Repérages, and the whole point of the design was to keep the houses and put the modern building behind them rather than through them.
While they were digging the foundations in the early 1990s, they broke into vaulted cellars nobody knew were there. Those cellars are now part of the route.
The thing everyone remembers is the lift. It is a glass cage that takes up to sixty-five people at once, and it is not really transport — it is the exhibit. Going down, you pass the bare rock the city was founded on. Going up, the valley of the Grund and the Rham plateau open out through the glass. A thousand years of the city, arranged vertically.
Below street level the permanent collection follows how the town was built and rebuilt; the upper floors are given over to temporary exhibitions. The museum dropped its old name in May 2017 and now calls itself the Lëtzebuerg City Museum, using the Luxembourgish spelling of the city.
