Svizzera 240: House Tour

Awarded by the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, the Swiss Pavilion Svizzera 240: House Tour exhibition refers to the standard height of housing in Switzerland and to the anonymity of contemporary interiors. Interiors are created at different scales and interconnected, in a labyrinthine sequence of perspectives. At first, everything seems familiar when entering the pavilion. But as the visit progresses, we are quickly transported like Alice to Wonderland in a world where everything is transformed. Switches, doors and other common design elements that usually remain unnoticed are narrowed or enlarged to draw attention to their banality, becoming exceptional. The authors of the pavilion thus highlight the problems of scale and harmony of composition in the face of the constraints of functionalism and standardization. The conference will present the research that led to this “House Tour”.

The architects Alessandro Bosshard, Li Tavor, Matthew van der Ploeg and Ani Vihervaara live and work in Zurich. Since 2015, they have been working as assistants and researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

Lecture in English