Without the Zurich professor Albert Heim (1849-1937), there would be no Glacier Garden Lucerne. But that's another story. You can imagine this scholar as a bearded mountain man who researched and mapped in the mountains with his Bernese mountain dog and certainly from time to time with his wife Marie Vögtlin, Switzerland's first female doctor with her own practice. He was an accurate observer, draughtsman and model maker.
Heim developed the model of an Alpine glacier in the glacier garden for educational purposes. It artistically shows the characteristic elements of a fictitious valley glacier with nourishing and feeding areas, crevasse types, ogives and moraines. Such landscape models were used to illustrate forms and structures. More than that, however, they were intended to encourage viewers to identify with the precious asset that is the landscape. After all, the changes to the landscape caused by rapid industrialization were already being critically observed by conservationists such as Albert Heim. The model in the glacier garden (located on the first floor of the museum) is likely to outlast the rapidly melting glaciers in the Alps.
