Switzerland

The interior of housing is the most familiar of architectures. Perhaps for this reason, it is also a kind of terra incognita. Photographs of unfurnished flat interiors have only recently become commonplace in architectural media. If the increased prominence of unfurnished flat photographs seems strange, it is precisely because the performance of housing’s interior surface has historically been predicated on the ‘suppression’ of its image. By foregrounding the appearance of the architectural enclosure, the images imply a challenge to the tradition of the inconspicuous interior and anticipate an alternate architectural sensibility through which to reimagine housing’s interior shell. Svizzera 240 celebrates the promise of the unfurnished image by constructing its theatrical counterpart, the house tour, within the Swiss pavilion. On this tour, the plan’s promise of control over scale, organisation, and function, is undermined by the representational deficiencies of the image in an attempt to highlight the latent plasticity of the world’s most popular habitat.