Kunstraum Engländerbau, local art in an English lottery's old offices

Of the six venues the tourist board counts along Vaduz’s museum mile, this is the only one that keeps nothing. There’s no collection. Every few months the room is emptied and someone else fills it, usually an artist from Liechtenstein or the region. That’s what I like about it, because it’s the quickest way to see what’s being made here right now.

A room with no collection and no shop

The Kunstraum takes up the second floor of the Engländerbau, which the state provides free for contemporary art, and since 2008 it has been run by the Kulturstiftung Liechtenstein, the public cultural foundation. Its own website is very clear about what it isn’t. It’s neither a museum nor a commercial gallery, so it doesn’t buy or sell work. It gives priority to artists from Liechtenstein and the region, and asks that every show be conceived for this particular room.

The room is a box 26.25 by 13.80 metres and 4.10 high, with no windows and no columns. That explains why so many shows are installations filling the whole space rather than paintings hung in a row.

Since September 2002 it has put on about 100 exhibitions, with more than 200 artists and over 80,000 visitors, according to the space. For a country of 41,000 people, that’s not bad going.

What’s on in autumn 2026?

Until 4 October it’s «Holobiont Habitat» by Stefan Kainbacher, and I’d climb the stairs for it alone. Eight black server racks stand in a circle, like a technological Stonehenge, holding living plants, sensors, grow lights and a system of AI agents trying to interpret the plants’ electrical signals. You see the results on screens and projections and hear them through synthesisers that turn those signals into sound.

On Saturday 3 October, from 18:00, the room opens for the Lange Nacht der Museen, the long night of museums run by the ORF. After that come Paulo Wirz with «Sistema Mestre», from 27 October to 13 December 2026, and the launch of the Kunstraum’s 25th anniversary, «Teilchen und Wellen», from 19 January to 17 March 2027. The rest of 2027 is already announced, with Patricia Jacomella Bonola in spring, a group show by the artists’ association Visarte Liechtenstein in June and July, a solo show by Klara Frick in August and Nándor Angstenberger from September to November. Come back in a year and there’ll be something else.

A building with a very odd past

The Engländerbau is worth a look from outside before you go in. It was designed in 1933 by Erwin Hinderer of Schaan for the Mutual Club, an Anglo-American lottery, hence the name. The lottery didn’t last. In 1934 Swiss lottery law was applied in Liechtenstein and it had to close.

What followed is one of the Städtle’s stranger tales. The building housed a dental factory and a radio station, and in 1944 the state bought it. Works from the Princely Collections were then shown there, including Rubens’s Decius Mus cycle, and from 1969 to 2000 it was home to the state art collection, before that moved to the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein. The Historisches Lexikon cites it as an early example of modern architecture in Vaduz, its steel skeleton hidden behind upright travertine slabs, climbing the castle rock in steps. Look up at the upper windows too. Since 1988-89 most have been filled with profiled metal panels designed by Bruno Kaufmann, which is why the facade looks half closed. The tourist office had its desk in this building from 1952 onwards, so generations of visitors started their Vaduz day here.

Hours, and how to fit it in

It opens seven days a week, always from 13:00 to 17:00, and entry is free. The one weak spot is access. The building has a wheelchair stairlift, but the gallery has no lift, so if you use a wheelchair ask downstairs before going up.

The same building holds the Liechtenstein Postage Stamp Museum, also free, and the Treasure Chamber. If your Vaduz day falls on a Monday, with the Kunstmuseum and the LandesMuseum shut, those three rescue the afternoon without you leaving the Engländerbau.

To fit it around the rest of the street, see my order on the museums of Liechtenstein page, and for the whole walk, the one on the Städtle.