Neighbours

An exploration of the relationship between the Swiss and Venezuelan pavilions at the Giardini della Biennale in Venice.

The Swiss Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale exhibits itself and the relations to its immediate surroundings. The exhibition is a conversation over the shared boundary of the pavilions of Switzerland (1952, designed by Bruno Giacometti) and Venezuela (1954, designed by Carlo Scarpa), the only two in the Giardini not fully detached: they share one wall. Artist Karin Sander and art historian Philip Ursprung temporarily open this wall and dismantle the gates from the Swiss Pavilion, thus revealing unanticipated connections between the two neighbors, both distant and close.

The complementing book offers a manifesto, a play with the two buildings as dramatis personae, and three brief topical essays. Ten conversations with architectural historian Kurt W. Forster, photographers Paolo Gasparini and Guido Giudi, and Venezuelan architects Elisa Silva and Margarita López-Maya round off this volume.

Karin Sander is a Berlin-based artist and a professor of art and architecture at ETH Zürich.

Philip Ursprung is professor of history of art and architecture at ETH Zürich’s Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture.