The Museon opened in 1904 as the Museum for Education. The idea came out of the classroom: children were learning about volcanoes, peoples and birds from books, and someone decided they should be able to hold those things as well. So the museum built a collection and lent it out to schools across the city.
That habit explains why the collection is so oddly broad. Minerals beside masks, stuffed animals beside measuring instruments, by now a few hundred thousand objects together. Few museums collect straight across disciplines like this, because few museums were founded as a tool for teachers.
In the nineteen eighties it moved into this building by on the Stadhouderslaan, built with ramps rather than staircases so that a school class walks through time in one continuous movement. It has recently merged with the Omniversum next door, the dome cinema where the picture carries on above your head.
The result is a museum still doing what it was invented for: showing things instead of describing them.
Want to get to know the city better? One of our walking routes through The Hague is a good next step.
Sources. Story: Museon-Omniversum (museon.nl) on its founding in 1904 as the Museum for Education, the collection and the merger with the Omniversum. Wim Quist's building: Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed. Photos: Source photo: Chemical Engineer, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
