The Swiss Pavilion has offered a complete "house tour" to an unfurnished interior of a contemporary housing, to criticise to the ubiquitous apartment interiors of various properties at the Venice Architecture Biennale, presented under the theme of Freespace. 

The Swiss Pavilion has also been named as the Best Pavilion among National Participants in this year's Venice Architecture Biennale. 

Image © Wilson Wootton, Alessandro Bosshard, Li Tavor, Matthew van der Ploeg und Ani Vihervaara

Titled Svizzera 240: House Tour, the Pavilion, curated by Alessandro Bosshard, Li Tavor, Matthew van der Ploeg and Ani Vihervaara, features a peculiar form of architectural representation by offering a house tour varied in different scales and perspectives. 

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.

Image © Wilson Wootton, Alessandro Bosshard, Li Tavor, Matthew van der Ploeg und Ani Vihervaara

Following a non-standard format of the architectural exhibition this year, the curators built "a house tour" instead of creating a typical "house" within the Swill Pavilion: a series of interior scenes are constructed at a range of different scales and spliced together, creating a labyrinthine sequence of interior perspectives.

Image © Wilson Wootton, Alessandro Bosshard, Li Tavor, Matthew van der Ploeg und Ani Vihervaara

"In preparing this tour, the curatorial team assembled a vast archive of unfurnished interior photographs from the websites of Swiss architecture offices," stated in a press statement.

"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. Like the whitewashed walls of art galleries or Protestant churches, the walls of a flat were never made to be looked at."

Image © Wilson Wootton, Alessandro Bosshard, Li Tavor, Matthew van der Ploeg und Ani Vihervaara

The curators introduce the paradoxical presence of the image of the unfurnished interior that implies a challenge to the tradition of the inconspicuous interior. The Pavilion aims to create an alternate architectural sensibility through which to reinterpret this most intimate surface of contact between architecture and society.

Image © Wilson Wootton, Alessandro Bosshard, Li Tavor, Matthew van der Ploeg und Ani Vihervaara

"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," read the Pavilion's manifesto.

"The image's inability to convey scale, dimension, depth or spatial adjacency is presented to the viewer in built form. You enter an impossible dwelling. On this tour, you are no longer an apartment dweller, builder or buyer —nor are you an academic or even an architect— you become an entirely new architectural subject, a house tourist."

Image © Wilson Wootton, Alessandro Bosshard, Li Tavor, Matthew van der Ploeg und Ani Vihervaara

Drawing on this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale theme Freespace, proposed by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, "Svizzera 240: House Tour" proposes that architecture’s relevance lay not solely in its capacity to build generous spaces, but also in its ability to construct representations which, by soliciting alternate ways to see or engage the world, are capable of extracting latent potential from even the most restricted architectural conditions.

Image © Christian Beutler / KEYSTONE

Image © Christian Beutler / KEYSTONE

Image © Christian Beutler / KEYSTONE

Image © Italo Rondinella, La Biennale di Venezia

Image © Italo Rondinella, La Biennale di Venezia

Image © Italo Rondinella, La Biennale di Venezia

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue produced in collaboration with Adam Jasper, Studio Martin Stoecklin and Park Books. This book takes the reader on a photographic house tour through the unfurnished Swiss apartment interior. 

The Switzerland Pavilion is supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.

The 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, will be on view from May 26th to November 25th, 2018 in the Giardini and the Arsenale, and around other venues in Venice.

Top image: Christian Beutler / KEYSTONE

> via Venice Architecture Biennale/Swiss Pavilion