House Tour : Views of the Unfurnished Interior

When we view photographs of unfurnished interiors, what we see looks almost nothing like the homes we ultimately inhabit: blank, labyrinthine spaces, featureless rooms with walls that meet at odd angles and exits that lead nowhere. These strange and seamless spaces make up a peculiar genre of representation: views of the unfurnished interior in architects’ online portfolios.

House Tour, which accompanied Switzerland’s award-winning contribution to the 2018 International Architecture exhibition of the Venice Biennale, is a playful yet thought-provoking celebration of this genre that is both familiar and not. In a series of essays, the contributors—anthropologists, art and architectural historians, and architectural theorists—consider the ubiquitous contemporary apartment, the void we inhabit with its standard measurements that reflect contemporary architecture’s key constraints. A striking visual journey, House Tour takes as its starting point almost three hundred photographs of such unfurnished interiors designed by leading Swiss architecture firms.