House Tour

240cm is the standard distance between floor and ceiling in residential buildings: the height of the void we inhabit. In its precision, and its emptiness, the number reflects contemporary interior architecture’s condition. In a series of essays, House Tour explores an interior that is both familiar and seemingly uninhabited, critically celebrating a peculiar genre of representation, the architectural photography of an unfurnished interior. The authors – including anthropologists, architecture theorists and art historians – consider the ubiquitous contemporary apartment from an eye-level view, foregrounding the appearance and material presence of the architectural shell. They start out from photographs of unfurnished interiors found on the websites of leading Swiss architecture firms. They have a blank, labyrinthine appearance, with walls intersecting at oblique angles and exits seemingly leading nowhere, and show featureless rooms with seamless transitions between surfaces. House Tour offers answers to the quest for a new language that adequately describes this architecture. Published to accompany the Swiss Pavilion, 16th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, 26 May – 25 November 2018.