In the pavilion of the Venice Biennale in Switzerland, light switches, doors and counters are shrunk or expanded, to draw attention to the interior design throughout the rental properties.
Called Casa Tour, the exhibition sees the Swiss Pavilion transformed into a labyrinth of unfurnished rooms, using the bland accessories commonly selected for newly built homes or rented apartments.
But the scale of the fixtures in each room has been altered, to give visitors an Alice in Wonderland experience. The intention is to draw attention to the typically forgotten decoration of white walls, plastic window frames and wooden floors.
"In Switzerland, we always call it a nation of tenants, most people live in rental apartments and move [often], so people want a standardized environment," said the architect's co-curator and Swiss pavilion. Alessandro Bosshard.
Bosshard, who cured the pavilion with Zurich-based architects Li Tavor, Matthew van der Ploeg and Ani Vihervaara, believes there should be more debate about the banal architecture surrounding tenants in the Western world.
By expanding or reducing the accessories designed to disappear in the background, they hope to take them into conversation. A new sequence of rooms has been inserted, alternating between scales, inside the building of the pavilion.
A giant door leads to a room with a generous ceiling height, huge windows and a kitchen equipped with a countertop placed on a level that is only suitable for a giant. Another small door attracts visitors through a space where everything has been reduced.
The curators collected hundreds of uniformly decorated apartment photographs as a point of reference for the pavilion.
Some of the images are presented side by side in the exhibition brochure to show how the almost identical details of the apartments make it difficult to distinguish them.
"If you see them together, they become a body of collective architecture," Bosshard said. "We really work with a limited amount of elements: they are always the same windows, the same plinth, the same walls, the same doors".
"Everything seems familiar, but if it continues, then you will realize that it is not what you expected, too small, too big, too open, distorted," he continued.
"The surface [decoration] becomes the exhibition on its own and asks what kind of architecture we are surrounded all the time."
Bosshard sees aesthetics as a kind of diluted modernism, reduced to smooth white walls, indescribable fixtures and laminate wood floors.
"The shell in the last 100 years has not changed much, the plans changed, the typologies changed, but the real surface, these white surfaces with wooden floors, is really stubborn," he said.
He added. "Of course, it's always related to modernism, Switzerland never abandoned the modern, it did not have a sharp break with modernism, it's more a continuation of it."
The Venice Architecture Biennale 2018 opens to the public on May 26 and continues until November 25, 2018.
This year's biennial is led by co-founders of the Irish practice Grafton Architects, Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara. The couple selected the title Freespace as the general theme of the event.
Speaking to Dezeen during a tour of his exhibition, Farrell and McNamara compared architecture to the movement of slow food, stating that the small projects or gestures that architects do within their work can have a positive impact on society.
They created a manifesto for the biennial, which demands a "generosity of spirit" in the architects' approach to design, either through the creation of a public space within a project or paying special attention to details such as the effect of illumination.
Bosshard hopes that House Tour will also capture this spirit if generosity: "We try to find generosity in the most stubborn condition of the interior or housing and find qualities by playing with the small elements".
The photograph is by Wilson Wooton.
