A Forgotten Woman Architect Finally Takes Her Place at the Venice Biennale

Visitors to the Venice Biennale probably aren’t thinking about who designed the Giardini’s national pavilions, where countries around the world present their exhibitions each year. But the Swiss pavilion at the 19th architecture biennale is a celebration of the late architect Lisbeth Sachs (1914–2002), who design her nation’s pavilion—until this year, that is.

In fact, not a single building in the Giardini is credited to a woman architect. (That will soon change with the completion of the new Qatar pavilion, set to be designed by Paris-based architect Lina Ghotmeh.) So the Swiss pavilion has changed that, temporarily, by resurrecting one of Sachs’s designs inside the building designed by her contemporary, Bruno Giacometti (1907–2012).

“The Giardini is a no-woman’s land,” Axelle Stiefel, one of the five-person all-woman curatorial team, told me. An artist, she joined forces with Elena Chiavi, Kathrin Füglister, Amy Perkins, and Myriam Uzor—the four members of architecture group Annexe—in conceiving a pavilion that presents an alternative history where women had contributed more visibly to our built environment.

“If we think of the necessity of inclusivity for a more sustainable future, we have to give more people a say in the construction and the building practice of the future, and have the voices of women being heard and being present physically,” Stiefel said.

Sachs was one of Switzerland’s first licensed women architects, graduating from architecture school in Zürich in 1939, long before Swiss women had the right to vote or open a bank account. (A referendum granted women’s suffrage in 1971; banking for women followed in 1985.) But when Sachs won an architecture competition in 1939, it jump-started her career.

For the Swiss pavilion, commissioned by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, the curators have resurrected the kunsthalle that Sachs built for the 1958 Swiss Exhibition for Women’s Work (SAFFA) in Zürich, organized by the Federation of Swiss Women’s Associations. But today there is almost no trace left of the lakeshore village built for the two-month event celebrating women’s work and their invisible labor, women’s creativity and capacity for avant-garde—and calling for equal rights for women.

“It was situated in a park in Zürich, and Lisbeth’s idea was to bring the landscape inside the exhibition space,” Stiefel said.

At the biennale, Sachs’s design is now nested inside Giacometti’s building, which was built in 1952, just a few years before SAFFA. There are three open, circular structures that intersect with the exterior of the existing pavilion—but the walls Sachs built weren’t curved. Instead, there are multiple straight walls on which to display artwork, extending out from each circle.

“The word is radiating,” Stiefel said. “The walls are never frontal, so it’s a more dynamic relationship. I don’t see any equivalent building that shows art that is as interesting and innovative and special.”

In the Venice recreation, those walls are built with wood, instead of the original concrete. There are fabric curtains, fluttering in the breeze, and a reimagining of Sachs’s translucent membrane roofs.

The curators have also added an audio element, with speakers integrated into Sachs’s design for the lighting, playing sound recorded during the building of the reimagined pavilion. That includes the ambient noises of the pavilion as construction site, but also the conversations of the curatorial team, from small talk to important moments of decision making. The audio component functions as a spatial memory, a record of the act of building a structure that is itself echoing back to a building long lost to the sands of time.

So while the project is about integrating the forgotten voice of a woman architect into a historic space, it also quite literally incorporates the voices of the contemporary women who brought Sachs’s design back to life. In addition, the audio serves to recreate a missing element of Sachs’s design.

“We have drawings. We have plans, maybe a few writings and photographs. But we don’t have the intangible of the experience of being an architect in the ’50s or about her direct experience on site,” Stiefel said. “The act of reinterpretation would only be half achieved if there was not also the attempt to be in the present and think about our experience and what we leave once we have to dismantle, once again, this kunsthalle.”

Of course, there was no way the curators could build a completely faithful reconstruction of Sachs’s original design. But a handwritten note by the architect on one of her drawings provided reassurance—as well as the exhibition title.

It read, “Endgültige Form wird von der Architektin am Bau bestimmt,” or “Final form will be defined by the architect on site,” a message allowing for the evolution of the design process in response to the conditions of the site.

It’s an ethos that the curators hope will extend to the way that visitors experience the exhibition.

“You need to be led by your own force of curiosity to wander about that space, like a labyrinth, and find out for yourself,” Stiefel said.

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com