ARCHITECTURE:Swiss Pavilion-Winner of Golden Lion at Venice Biennale of Architecture
A house tour offers a meandering, eye-level view onto the apartment interior. This view consolidates into a series of images, which register the apartment according to the qualities and affects afforded by its quintessential architectural palette: a ±240 centimetre volume dressed with white walls, skirting board, wood or tile flooring and off-the-shelf components and fittings.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Swiss Pavilion Archive
The exhibition “Svizzera 240: House Tour” at the Swiss Pavilion at the 16th Architecture Biennale di Venezia, focuses on the unfurnished interior of contemporary housing by celebrating a peculiar form of architectural representation, the “house tour”. Visitors to the Biennale are invited to come into the Swiss Pavilion and take a house tour of the ubiquitous apartment interior. What is built within the Swiss Pavilion is not a «house» but a house tour: interior scenes are constructed at a range of different scales and spliced together, creating a labyrinthine sequence of interior perspectives. As the Curatorial team says “The paradoxical presence of the image of the unfurnished interior implies a challenge to the tradition of the inconspicuous interior and anticipates an alternate architectural sensibility through which to reinterpret this most intimate surface of contact between architecture and society”. The curatorial team assembled a vast archive of unfurnished interior photographs from the websites of Swiss architecture offices. By focusing attention on the apartment’s unadorned shell, these house tour images foreground an iconoclastic surface that has historically avoided the purview of architectural representation by hiding behind the plan’s promise of rationality and control. The installation reverses the standard format of the architectural exhibition. Instead of representing building (or using representation in order to build), the architects build representation. The construction of the installation adheres more to the principles of the image of an apartment than those of an actual apartment. The image’s inability to convey scale, dimension, depth or spatial adjacency is presented to the viewer in built form.
Info: Project team: Ani Vihervaara, Alessandro Bosshard, Li Tavor and Matthew van der Ploeg, Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Giardini, Venice, Duration: 26/5-25/11/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.labiennale.org & https://biennials.ch
