Swiss Pavilion Research Articles

Preference for accent and background colors in interior architecture in terms of similarity/contrast of natural color system attributes

AbstractColor combination criteria are said to entail an affective response in interior design. We investigated the color combination criteria that orient the preference of current observers, after Le Corbusier's 1931 Salubra keyboards. We explored the similarity/contrast in Natural Color System (NCS) hue, blackness, and chromaticness in 312 combinations with four colors, two backgrounds and two accent colors, coming from 43 individual colors, on the walls of a simulated interior of a bedroom from the Swiss Pavilion (Le Corbusier, 1930‐1931). Participants were 644 students of architecture and interior design in Western Europe and Near East, who evaluated with a Likert scale their preference for virtual images via an online survey. Results indicate that the most preferred color combinations are those with hues closer in the color wheel, being the similarity between hues in the backgrounds more important than in the accent colors, and with NCS B30G to G as the most preferred hues. Observers preferred color compositions with blackness under 10% and similar blackness between the two background colors, together with a certain blackness contrast between these background colors and the two color accents. Similarly, observers liked color compositions with low chromaticness and low chromaticness difference among the four colors of the composition.

Moving Image Installation, Dance, and Resistance at the 2019 Venice Biennale

IMAGE 1. Installation view of Moving Backwards (2019) by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz in the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2019; courtesy the artists; photograph by Annik Wetter. Can dancing be a survival strategy? Such is the question posed by artist Mirkan Deniz in her examination of a Kurdish “guerrilla dance” as a site of resistance. Deniz's query was included in the series of letters to the visitor distributed along with Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz's film installation Moving Backwards (2019) in the Swiss Pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale (May 11–November 24, 2019). The urgency of our present moment permeated much of the sprawling biennial, grouped loosely under the apocryphal proverb and curse “May You Live In Interesting Times.” Artists tackled climate catastrophe, rising right-wing nationalism and authoritarianism, refugee crises, and other pressing social and political issues in a range of media and with a variety of attitudes. Moving image installation invites surrender to a different temporality amid the fast-paced tempo of both these “interesting times” and the packed itinerary of biennale tourists, and it figured prominently in the group show curated by Ralph Rugoff at the Giardini and Arsenale locations as well as in numerous pavilions and collateral events scattered throughout the city. Of the twenty-nine national pavilions of the Giardini—the Biennale's original location and where national pavilions first emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century—eleven prominently featured moving image artworks, and these ranged widely in both quality and tone. Laure Prouvost's beautiful, frenetic, and surreal journey film Deep See Blue Surrounding You (2019) and Larissa Sansour's tense two-channel take on the psychological sci-fi thriller in Heirloom …

L’Esprit du Sacré: Le Corbusier and the necessary Utopia of Sainte Marie de La Tourette

“L’homme qui recherche l’harmonie a le sens du sacré”. In this way Le Corbusier claims the main difference between holiness and spirituality. In the omitted comparison, it is clear that the Architect's main interest is to highlight the strong laical and spiritual character of which is harmonious both in Nature and Architecture. Thanks to this approach, the democratic reception of the spiritual feeling overcomes the sacred one which remains linked to semantics stratifications that still require interpretation. In order to develop a democratic vision to community life, Le Corbusier entrusts the rules of a daily living, with the contingent possibilities of a community such as the Dominican one and also with the need to individual seclusion, celebrating immanence and silence. “Loger dans le silence des hommes de prière et d’étude et leur construire une église”.The celebration of both prayer and community life is what Le Corbusier wants to achieve, without distracting attention from the main purpose of the spiritual and individual growth, that nourishes the utopian function of this project. This shares a common research with the other architectures conceived for a community life such as l’Unité d’Habitation or the Swiss Pavilion. This is the way the liturgical spaces welcome daily life evaluating un homme de 24 heures, arranging an hermeneutical relationship between places for gathering and meditation. From this we can acknowledge that architecture of the Le Corbusier’s Convent, allows holy inspirational feelings among liturgical and environmental spaces. All this is due to an hard intellectual work based on humanism, far from faith, but open to spiritual values and mystical feelings which place Beauty as an existential motivation for a religious work, including human dimension and the answers to his needs.

Die Inszenierung einer «Schweizer Hygiene». Der Schweizer Pavillon an der Internationalen Hygiene-Ausstellung Dresden, 1911

In May 1911, the fi rst International Hygiene Exhibition opened its doors in Dresden. Plenty of objects relevant to the fi eld of hygiene were found in various halls on the spacious showground. In addition, 30 national pavilions were built along an avenue. One of these pavilions was the «Schwyzer Hus», the Swiss pavilion. At the beginning of the twentieth century Swiss representatives were part of an international scientifi c network. They collaborated to develop what became known as scientific hygiene. This paper analyses the planning, realisation and reception of the Swiss pavilion. I want to show how the Swiss experts of hygiene positioned themselves among the other nations and how they worked to establish a «Swiss hygiene».

Walking through Le Corbusier: a tour of his masterworks

1. General introduction to Le Corbusier, including images of his first houses in La Chaux-de-Fonds: Fallet (1907), Stotzer and Jacquement (1908), Jeanneret (1912) and Schwob (1916), the latter serving as a transition to his later output 2. Interwar buildings including the Petite Maison (1924), Villa Savoye (1929) and the Swiss Pavilion (1932) 3. Postwar buildings: Manufactures Duval (1951), the Brazilian Pavilion (1959), the Sainte Marie de la Tourette Convent (1960), Unite de Marseille (1962), the Ecluse Kembs-Niffer (1962) and the Centre Le Corbusier.

The individual and mass housing: the delicate balance

One of Alvar Aalto's major preoccupations throughout his life's work was redefining the place of the individual in modern society in the face of industrialization, urbanization, and the political ideologies of extreme left and right. Unwilling to accept the Communist models of communal living and their rigid architectural suppression of individuality as well as Le Corbusian paradigms of platonic idealism, Aalto set out in MIT's Baker Dormitory to redefine the modern mass housing model with Le Corbusier's Swiss Pavilion as a point of departure.

Le Corbusier and the space of photography

In 1933, after a decade of adamantly opposing the decorative arts in architecture, Le Corbusier adorned his recently completed PavilIon Suisse with a photo-mural. Comprising forty-four square photographs and extending the length of a long, precisely curved wall, the photo-mural served as focal point to this dormitory for Swiss students in Paris. The black-and-white images combined highly abstract microscopic and aerial views of nature with equally abstract views of geometric, man-made objects (figure 1). In a lecture in Prague two years later, André Breton — his Surrealist viewpoint the antithesis of Le Corbusier's Purist perspective — heartily praised the photo-mural, commending it as an example of ‘concrete irrationality’. He saw in it ‘the desire for ideal things’ often found in Art Nouveau architecture, describing it as ‘irrationally wavy’ and comparing it with two ‘surreal’ monuments: the Ideal Palace of the mailman Cheval and Antonio Gaudí's Barcelona cathedral, a ‘magnificent church, all in vegetables and crustaceans’. And though Breton felt that the Swiss pavilion answered ‘all the conditions of rationality and coldness that anyone could want in recent years since it is the work of Le Corbusier’, he nevertheless viewed the photo-mural as indication that architecture was again attempting ‘to break through all its limits’. His lecture was titled ‘Surrealist Situation of the Object’.1