Architecture Biennale 2023 – The wall must go: Switzerland and Venezuela become neighbors – Culture

Venice becomes the “laboratory of the future”. The 18th Architecture Biennale in the lagoon city is looking for ideas for future building. The Swiss contribution shows how this can be done – and how neighborhood works.

Under the title “Neighbours”, Switzerland is placing its own pavilion and its Venezuelan neighbors at the center of the exhibition, which will be on display until November 26th.

Artist Karin Sander and art historian Philip Ursprung have worked out the closeness and distance, the togetherness and the boundaries of the two pavilions. «There is a wall that divides the pavilions, but it also separates them. You can’t see at all. In other words, many people didn’t even know that these two pavilions were built together,” says Philip Ursprung.

Use instead of rebuild

For the Architecture Biennale, the co-curators removed precisely this wall and thus created new perspectives on the neighbour. Karin Sander demands that in the future architecture must concentrate more on what already exists than on what is new. “These are retrograde strategies that you don’t just add up, build new, but edit what’s there”.

No other pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale is as close together as the Swiss and Venezuelan. Sometimes they are only a few centimeters apart.

Two become one

The Swiss Pavilion was built in 1952 by Bruno Giacometti, brother of Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti. His Venezuelan neighbor a few years later by the Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa. ‘Scarpa must have seen what’s there. He uses the outer wall of the Swiss Pavilion as his own outer wall so as not to build two walls. There is a game, a sense of common perception,” says Philip Ursprung.

Legend:

Crossing borders: Switzerland and Venezuela playfully get closer to each other on the larger-than-life original plans of their pavilions.

KEYSTONE / Gaetan Bally

Switzerland and Venezuela – in reality, the two countries are anything but neighbors, but in Venice they stand wall to wall. With the topic of neighborhood, Ursprung and Sander also hit a nerve with the times.

World politics in Venice

The pandemic, war in Europe and tensions around the world have given borders and neighborhoods a whole new meaning. «To what extent does Switzerland retain its neutrality, how far does it open up to Europe or its neighbors. Especially now, with these political tensions, this is a very topical issue, »says Sander.

Legend:

Beautiful views not only of the lagoon city, but also of the future of architecture: that is what the 18th Architecture Biennale 2023 promises.

IMAGO / Arnulf Hettrich

With the dismantling of a wall, the Swiss Pavilion shows how a neighborhood can change. What that does to a neighborhood relationship ultimately depends on both sides.