Training for exceptional craftspeople
A University of Hands
Via events around the world, online and, in future, at our planned Engadin campus, House of Manus Academy is establishing a platform for discourse that will engage with the future of artisan manufacturing and open up alternative career opportunities, particularly for young people. A university of hands, that, by training both head and hand, will be developing tomorrow’s outstanding craftspeople and industry leaders.
As an international school dedicated to superlative craftsmanship, House of Manus Academy will offer budding designers and makers an inspiring place to learn. Craftsmanship has a strong tradition in Switzerland, where it is highly prized and backed by a long-established dual education model that combines apprenticeships with further schooling. Our academy takes its cue from that model, partnering with with vocational schools and opening it up to a global elite of would-be artisans.
The education the academy will offer to young people and experienced craft professionals (as well as to executives looking for unusual additional qualifications) will be equivalent to a first-class university education. Students will follow a preliminary foundation course in the Bauhaus mould and work with prominent industry figures, with leading practitioners from the fields of interior design, architecture, decorative arts and product design as well as executives from international artisan businesses.
„Architekten, Bildhauer, Maler, wir alle müssen uns auf das Handwerk besinnen!“
Walter Gropius



Campus and training platform
The House of Manus Academy complements apprenticeship and trade schools with an expanded curriculum: From management tasks and business strategy development to communications and branding, House of Manus Academy students will acquire all the skills they need in addition to mastery of their highly specialized craft in order to develop as successful, independent makers—as elite artisans and as future leaders and shapers of their field.
At the same time, House of Manus Academy serves as an enabler and facilitator, bringing together educational platforms, applied arts schools, design schools, artist-in-residence programmes and artisan manufacturers and providing support – via joint fundraising, combined reach and active dialogue, for instance – with the aim of championing our common mission with a shared voice.
“The magnet of Black Mountain was not luxurious living but the luxurious mind.”
A student at Black Mountain College
Education as Grand Tour
At House of Manus Academy, tomorrow’s outstanding artisans will benefit from an educational “grand tour”. This rich and varied global journey will produce graduates with vision and cosmopolitan attitudes who have learned from the best in their field, allowing locally concentrated knowledge to be passed on and brought to an international stage. The academy will thus meet the specific challenges of delivering teaching excellence in the field of crafts, of training up the new talent that elite artisan businesses around the world so urgently require.
At the same time, House of Manus Academy will be a place of lively debate that aims to spark and shape public discourse around the future of artisan manufacturing. It will be in the vanguard of a movement that brings together head and hand, encouraging highly talented generalists to develop their ability to grasp the world with their hands as well as their minds, and to thus develop a fuller appreciation of it.