Exhibitions are perceived first and foremost as presentation rooms and displays for themes and objects. On a deeper level, however, they also reflect the interests and values of their promoters, hosts, and target audience. This has led to the establishment, on the one hand, of the museum as an institution, and on the other, of temporary topical shows in public space. As complex settings of display, they transform over the course of history.
In terms of themes and formats, the Swiss Exhibition for Women’s Work (SAFFA) of 1958 in Zurich and La Biennale di Venezia could not be more different.1 What unites them, however, is not only their public aspiration and mission, but also their setting in an urban context. Both events build upon pre-existing conditions while raising new questions. They are held at exhibition grounds to whose built fabric they react. And they seek to impress their public with topical innovations and presentations. But their resonance is hardly comparable. Whereas the Venice Biennale has been held at regular intervals since 1893 and has steadily grown in size, international attention, and thematic scope, the SAFFA took place only twice and generated local attention, at best. These differences make it difficult to trace the continuity and breaks in the conception and realization of their respective exhibitions. Nonetheless, connections, displacements, and overlays of exhibition concepts, spaces, and formats can be identified between the two.2
The “Exhibition,” a Medium in Transition
Exhibitions are presentation formats and spaces of communication where knowledge is temporarily or permanently made accessible to a large audience using various media. They operate in different contexts—art, business, science—and present equally different formats and careers.
Art exhibitions have an important role in the history of exhibitions in general. By making selected works of art accessible to a larger audience in dedicated spaces according to specific rules, they helped structure a continuous tradition of display. Formed at art academies and further developed in the so-called independent salons of the nineteenth century, they constitute familiar settings, both for conceiving and visiting art. The gallery creates a specific framework through the spatial sequence, placement, and arrangement of artworks in the room, thus guiding their contemplation. Access and viewing angle, scope and duration of the exhibition, are therefore basic elements to consider from the start.
The history of the art exhibition in the twentieth century develops into the concept of the white cube, which institutionalizes the spatial situation as a neutral display marked by white walls and large gaps between artworks, thereby asserting the latter’s independence from context. This has since been questioned in the emergence of site-specific formats (site-specific art, land art), as well as open-air exhibitions popularized in the second half of the twentieth century, which incorporate public space—the park or the city—as a backdrop for or part of the show.3
The transept of the Great Exhibition. Looking south. Source: Richard Beard, John Jabez Edwin Mayall, Tallis's history and description of the Crystal Palace, and the exhibition of the world's industry in 1851 (London and New York: John Tallis and Co., 1852). Source: ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Alte und Seltene Drucke.
Exhibiting relates not only to art but also to areas of business and trade. Goods were traded in the Middle Ages at temporary markets held at regular intervals, which established interregional connections. These “marketing opportunities” allowed manufacturers and vendors to showcase goods or services for sale and create meeting places/contact zones between producers and consumers.
During industrialization in Europe, this format evolved into sales-oriented exhibitions promoting industrial, craft, agricultural, horticultural, and construction goods. Under the influence of an unbridled faith in progress, the nineteenth century saw the emergence of fairs geared toward publicizing new products. Their quality was evaluated by a jury before they were presented to a broader public.
Testaments to technological advancement—machines and industrial goods—were showcased on regional and national levels before a multi-themed, universal concept for fairs was brought into the world in Great Britain, then the leading industrial nation and colonial power. The first World’s Fair, held in London’s Hyde Park in 1851, was housed in the Crystal Palace, designed by Joseph Paxton. This structure was at once the exhibition dispositif and the fair’s landmark. Inside, technological breakthroughs (such as structural steel) and great amounts of industrial products alongside architecture, crafts, and art were exhibited. That such an uncommon amassing of goods, machines, and artworks can reflect the self-image of a society has only transpired over time.
Subsequently, World’s Fairs were held in various cities across Europe and the USA.4 These lavishly outfitted exhibitions, complete with amusement facilities and folk festivals, provided a new kind of spectacle for a mass audience. The interior of national pavilions with their elaborate national and colonial village backdrops showcased a miniature version of the world that was as “authentic” as possible and created immersion effects for visitors that made their awareness of the production’s fictional nature dissipate.5 They staged a narrative of progress that combined economic development, technological advances, and the colonial expansion of Europe, and furthermore pretended to host a friendly competition between the peoples of the world.6
As mass events with elaborate traffic planning, landscape architecture, and waste management apparatuses, these fairs also served as models for urbanism and had influence over urban development and design. Already for the first World’s Fair in London, the public park played an important role as a venue and frame. Hyde Park was not only a suitable location for the temporary interventions due to its expansive open spaces, it was also the epitome of a new urban citizenry to which this new type of spectacle catered.
Existing or newly planned public parks equally offered themselves as venues for the subsequent World’s Fairs. The parks’ lawns permitted the construction of temporary structures, while their existing trees defined the structures’ placement and thematic sequence. For industrial, construction, horticultural, and agricultural fairs, parks provided an appropriate framework. Reciprocally, temporary exhibitions have defined the public spaces of cities. For example, the Eiffel Tower once formed the entrance to the Champ de Mars exhibition grounds at the Paris World’s Fair of 1889. The fact that it was not dismantled as originally planned eventually allowed it to become the city’s landmark.
Exhibitions reflect societal values, world views, and systems of thought, which makes them inseparable from their hosts, exhibits, and public. Tracing the history of exhibiting, a range of very different gestures and intentions of displaying can be identified and critiqued. Mieke Bal likens an exhibition’s makers to both the invisible subjects and narrators of a text.7 In her comparison of two museums—the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both in New York City—she shows how the exhibitory discourse (the negotiation of contents and ways of showing) is rendered invisible for the broader public, to which it presents as neutralizing, truthful speech. That is to say, visitors cannot see the hidden positioning and presuppositions without appropriate hints; what appears as the truth is in fact a statement tinged by authorship.
James Clifford and Mary Louise Pratt both coined the term and idea of the “contact zone,” applying it to the museum as well as to cultural objects.8 Both demonstrate that such contact zones are far more than pure places of encounter between an exhibit and a viewer. Exhibitions in particular can also be read as reified power structures and conflicts, which primarily highlight the values and desires of their organizers through the targeted selection of objects, the construction of narratives, and their storytelling perspectives. It is therefore always instructive to ask, “Who is showing what, where, how, and for whom?”
The Venice Biennale at the Giardini Pubblici
The first Venice Biennale took place in 1893. Following the Venice City Council’s 1887 decision to organize a biennial exhibition of Italian art, the Esposizione biennale artistica nazionale not only proved to be a great success, but quickly developed into a recurring international art show. The format of the World’s Fair served as a model, with national committees appointed to select the works.9 As the first permanent building for temporary art shows in Venice, the Palazzo dell’Esposizione at the Giardini Pubblici di Castello was built in 1894–95, serving as the spatial frame for the artworks of both national and international artists. Radiating from this architectural center, a broader exhibition concept began to develop.
The Giardini Pubblici di Castello had been filled in during the Napoleonic era and developed into a public park for the residents of the city in 1807 according to plans by architect Giannantonio Selva. Soon after the Palazzo dell’Esposizione was built, the first permanent national pavilions followed on the site, usually designed and built by the participating nations themselves.10 The first national pavilion was designed in 1907 by Belgian architect and designer Léon Sneyers for his country. By the outbreak of the Second World War, a total of fifteen pavilions had been erected, all by renowned architects from participating countries, amounting to a veritable architecture exhibition of the discipline’s heavyweights of the time. 1948 saw the Biennale return following the end of the war. The art exhibition’s international recognition led not only to the construction of numerous additional national pavilions, but also to the expansion of the exhibition grounds. An important figure in this process was the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa, who, in addition to a number of extensions, built the Venezuelan Pavilion in 1954.11 Scarpa understood how the spatial, material, and immaterial layers of the city became superimposed over time and served as the foundation of architecture—which, in turn, inscribes itself in these very layers. Instead of being conceived as separate from the landscape surrounding it, building thus becomes a continuation of and link to the pre-existing built fabric.
View of the newly constructed Swiss Pavilion by Bruno Giacometti during the twenty-sixth Venice Biennale, 1952. Photo: © Maria Netter, SIK-ISEA, Courtesy Fotostiftung Schweiz.
The construction of the current Swiss Pavilion took place in the postwar era. Switzerland first participated in the exhibition in 1920.12 Its first pavilion was realized in 1932 on the island of Sant’Elena, far from the official exhibition grounds, based on a design by Martin Risch.13 Since it quickly became clear that the building was too small (and too far away), a new pavilion was built in the city park next to the main entrance. In 1951 the Federal Department of Home Affairs invited architects Max Bill, Bruno Giacometti, Werner Krebs, and John Torcapel to participate in a competition, which Giacometti won with a proposal to create a traditional setting for the presentation of artworks in a stripped-down, modern formal language.14
From the outside, the pavilion’s exposed brickwork façade and garden walls presents a clear form. Behind the walls, the pavilion consists of different volumes that are functionally configured as a patio, an entrance hall and loggia, and three galleries: a painting gallery, a graphics gallery, and a sculpture gallery. While the painting gallery is completely enclosed by walls, the sculpture gallery opens onto the patio, and the graphics gallery has a window overlooking a landscaped space between the volumes. This spatial formation juxtaposes the sculptural qualities of art and nature, which is represented by an old tree in the courtyard. Ever since, its spatial concept has increasingly proved to be constraining for contemporary art, and in 2006 the question was raised whether the pavilion should once again be replaced by a new one. It was left untouched, however, and its spatial qualities even became part of the Swiss contribution’s concept in 2023.15
Exhibition Topics and Zeitgeist
Exhibitions can be placed at the center of public attention when they take up topical or unconventional subjects. This was the case for SAFFA, the Swiss Exhibition for Women’s Work, which was held for the first time in 1928 and then again in 1958.16 SAFFA put a spotlight on the societal role of women. The exhibition therefore worked to improve their position within society and their political rights. Its promoters were big Swiss women’s organizations, which sought to further the recognition of female labor and gender equality within the country.
The first SAFFA was organized by and for women in Bern in 1928, at Viererfeld, which had earlier hosted the third Swiss National Exhibition.17 The architect Lux Guyer axially arranged various exhibition halls on the show grounds, where topics from agriculture, industry, domestic work, gainful employment, science, education, and art were presented. What survived the exhibition, though not on site, was Guyer’s design for a low-cost, prefabricated model of a timber house for a middle-class family. This was later meant to be produced on a larger scale, but it never surpassed the prototype stage. While the public response was lukewarm, the exhibition was an economic success: in 1931, the proceeds were used to set up a credit cooperative to support female entrepreneurs in Switzerland.
Thirty years later, the same year as the Brussels World’s Fair, the second edition of SAFFA was held in Zurich.18 Hosted by the Federation of Swiss Women’s Associations (Bund Schweizerischer Frauenvereine), it was another sign of protest against the fact that women were still excluded not only from national exhibitions, leading roles in society, and other positions, but also from voting in elections. For a short time span of two months, and equipped with only a small budget offset by exceptional dedication, Swiss women under the lead of architect Annemarie Hubacher-Constam made their case at Landiwiese on Lake Zurich’s left shore. This location played no small role in the ultimate impact and importance of the 1958 SAFFA.
Both lakeshores in Zurich had been partially filled in, refortified with rubble, and landscaped with a rural aesthetic during the nineteenth century. In addition to their function as urban promenades, the lakeside parks were increasingly used as venues for trade exhibitions in the early twentieth century. The fourth Swiss National Exhibition in 1939, known as “Landi 39,” left a clear mark on Switzerland’s collective memory.19 Thanks to its modern exhibition architecture and numerous amusement facilities, including a cable car that crossed the lake, the Landi fairground created a strong identity for the Swiss during the Second World War. Today, the area, known as Landiwiese, is a popular public park and bathing spot.
The Swiss National Exhibition of 1939 set the standard for later exhibitions. It also served as a point of reference for the second edition of SAFFA, which was given the motto “Sphere of Women’s Life in Family, Occupation, and Country.” In the footsteps the first edition, the 1958 SAFFA sought to improve the position of women in society. However, in line with a prevailing conservative attitude towards women, the exhibition’s organizers advocated a three-stage model of life (vocational training and employment until marriage, then homemaking, and finally returning to work once their children had grown up), which hardly questioned the role of women as the center of the family. The exhibition project involved architects, landscape architects, interior and graphic designers, as well as artists, most of whom struggled in a male-dominated world and failed to gain prominence even in the exhibition’s aftermath.20
From a formal point of view, the exhibition’s creators drew inspiration from the Landi 39: they revived the cable car, created a small artificial island on the lake, built modern thematic pavilions, and designed exteriors and gardens. In addition to the numerous thematic exhibition halls, the exhibition offered a commercial street, the artistic project “Die Linie” (“The Line,” an array of larger-than-life portraits of women who had marked the country’s history), a residential tower, an ideal vacation home, an ideal devotional room, and many more. Modern, affordable, and reusable were the watchwords of the exhibition. Every design element—architecture, graphic design, interiors—followed these and other modern principles. Round forms dominated its formal language, from the exhibition pavilions to the wall labels.
An important characteristic of the exhibition’s design was the use of cheap, prefabricated elements and materials. The short duration of the exhibition and limited financial means were turned into assets. The cylindrical tent buildings, an accessible residential tower, and other buildings were constructed with industrial construction material (structural steel with bolted joints) that could be reused after the exhibition. The structures were fitted with tensioned fabric as roofs and wall coverings, concrete was cast in untreated timber formwork, and prefabricated windows let light in.
For the presentation of artworks (mostly sculptures and paintings) and craft items, architect Lisbeth Sachs collaborated with Werner Müller on the construction of the so-called “Kunsthalle.”21 She proposed three circular, interconnected rooms covered with translucent plastic, within which concrete walls of varying lengths were mounted on stilts and arranged in a spiral. With her design, Sachs not only went beyond the usual architectural framing of an exhibition with rooms that had become as “neutral” and rectangular as possible, she also wanted to use open, flowing spaces to find an answer to the question of how visitors could otherwise encounter images and works of art, freed from the museal environment. After eight weeks, the experiment came to an end and was quickly forgotten until it was taken up again within the framework of contemporary debates.
With its new shoreline, SAFFA inscribed itself durably into the city’s lakefront. Using the excavation material of a larger construction project, the architects created a small island of about 3,000 square meters in front of the Landiwiese, thereby expanding the fairground with an additional area. The artificial island is connected to the shore by a small bridge, provides views of the lake and bathing area, and has kept the name SAFFA-Insel (SAFFA island) to this day.
Whereas the 1958 SAFFA edition led to little change in the exhibition’s wake, its architectural feats have been remembered fondly. Only a year later, the same fairground hosted the first Swiss Horticulture Exhibition, G59, which built upon the physical structures and knowledge created during SAFFA and reconfigured the landscape left behind by the latter.
Picking Up the Traces
Exhibition sites are palimpsests that are continually overwritten with new texts from temporary exhibitions. Which ones remain legible, which ones disappear? While the Venice Biennale at the Giardini has become a model of success and an inspiration for other cities, SAFFA has had little resonance beyond Switzerland. Its traces seem to be lost in the landscape and in collective memory, even though it is exemplary for its modern and innovative exhibition architecture and displays.
The spoken and unspoken conventions of exhibitions change over time, and the political, economic, cultural, and social molding of an exhibition is expressed in the exhibition objects as well as in its setting. In discourse on exhibitions, obsolete concepts are overwritten, the repressed is brought to the surface, and new perspectives are uncovered. At first glance, Bruno Giacometti’s 1952 Swiss Pavilion for the Venice Biennale and Lisbeth Sachs’s Kunsthalle for SAFFA 1958, seem to have little in common. A closer look reveals some common threads, however. The journal Das Werk in 1952 dedicated its September issue to cultural buildings, showcasing Hans Leuzinger’s Kunsthaus Glarus and Bruno Giacometti’s Pavilion for the Venice Biennale alongside Lisbeth Sachs’s spa town theater in Baden (in the canton of Aargau).22 After that, however, their careers significantly diverged.
Bruno Giacometti’s 1952 Swiss Pavilion for the Venice Biennale was a public commission. He already had experience in designing exhibition buildings, having realized the Swiss Pavilion at various international trade exhibitions since 1945. The pavilion for the Venice Biennale is entirely in the tradition of modern functionalism, and as “utility architecture,” creates clear, rectangular, and unobstructed spaces for the optimal display of art (painting and sculpture). The credo of the neutral space and the circulation patterns for the contemplation of art was not called into question.
Lisbeth Sachs’s Kunsthalle, conversely, is an experiment within the framework of an exceptional exhibition. Additionally, the space built for only a short period of time is an experimental setup for a new way of exhibiting, which posits the exhibition space as flowing and relational, thus breaking free from the right angles of functionalist modernism. Even if Sachs had been able to afford to establish her own office after winning the competition for the theater in Baden, she would’ve faced a difficult situation as a woman in the construction industry. Her projects were delayed, or she was sidelined by men when it came to the detailing and construction stages.
These two pavilions for art exhibitions, built mere years apart, are based on different spatial concepts and contexts. They are therefore yardsticks not only for changes in exhibitory frameworks for art, but also for the way contextual conventions are dealt with. That is why the time has come to question the text and context of exhibitions and create new ones from the network of material and immaterial traces.
While the Venice Biennale is well documented and the object of much research, there are few known facts about the 1958 edition of SAFFA in Zurich. See SAFFA 1958: Städtebau, Architektur und Ausstellungsdesign im internationalen Kontext, Swiss National Science Foundation Project, 2020–22, ZHAW Winterthur.
At the 2025 Architecture Biennale, both exhibitions will be united by an overlay at the Swiss Pavilion, curated by Annexe with the title The final form is determined by the architect on site. The dismantled “Kunsthalle” by Lisbeth Sachs, originally shown at SAFFA 58, will be reconstructed in the exhibition pavilion by Bruno Giacometti, creating a temporary spatial overlap.
See, in particular, Skulptur Projekte Münster, held every 10 years since 1977.
In quick succession and with a continuous stream of landmarks and inventions: New York (1853), Paris (1855), London again (1862), Paris again (1867), Vienna (1873), Philadelphia, Paris, Amsterdam, Paris, Chicago, Milan, etc. The rest of the world was excluded far into the twentieth century, exemplifying where the economic power lies.
See Martin Wörner, Die Welt an einem Ort: Illustrierte Geschichte der Weltausstellungen (Berlin: Reimer, 2000); Alexander C.T. Geppert, “Welttheater: Die Geschichte des europäischen Ausstellungswesens im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Ein Forschungsbericht,” Neue Politische Literatur no. 1 (2002): 10–61.
In the logic of an imperial, colonial racist system and as a result of increasing mobility, objects, animals, and people were selected as representative of their culture and displayed against their will as “exotic” exhibits. From today’s perspective, such events are read as yet another instrument of colonization and have also set in motion a process of decolonization of exhibitions.
Cf. Mieke Bal, “Telling, Showing, Showing Off,” Critical Inquiry vol. 18, no. 3 (Spring 1992): 556–94.
Cf. James Clifford, “Museums as Contact Zones,” in: Routes: Travel and Translation in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 33–40.
“Giardini della Biennale,” La Biennale di Venezia, accessed January 21, 2025, ➝; Maria Vittoria Martini: “A Brief History of I Giardini: Or a Brief History of the Venice Biennale Seen from the Giardini,” in Muntadas. On Translation:I Giardini (Barcelona: Actar, 2005), 205–34.
In designing the project, Selva was assisted by a botanist responsible for the selection of plant species and their placement, as this required special knowledge of the new soil and the lagoon climate. Today, the Giardini, including all trees, are a protected area. See ibid.
See Peter Noever, ed., Carlo Scarpa: The Craft of Architecture, exh. cat. (Osfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2003).
See Outlines 8, nos. 1–2 (2013); Cäsar Menz, “Die Teilnahme der Schweiz an der Biennale von Venedig 1920–1960,” Zeitschrift für Schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte 43 (1986): 411–16.
Martin Risch is a representative of the Heimatstil {a late-nineteenth-century historicist architectural style in German-speaking countries; translator’s note}. See Elisabeth Crettaz-Stürzel, Heimatstil: Reformarchitektur in der Schweiz 1896–1914 (Frauenfeld: Huber, 2005), 317–18.
As an employee in Karl Egender’s architectural office, Bruno Giacometti was involved in the construction of the Hallenstadion stadium in Zurich (1938–39) and the National Exhibition (1939). He advocated modern architecture that was primarily intended to serve people and not to express the architect’s formal desire for expression.
At the 2023 Architecture Biennale, Karin Sander and Philip Ursprung turned the pavilion’s architecture itself into an exhibit with their contribution Neighbours opening up new perspectives on territorial relations.
See, among a wide range of publications, k+a 71, no. 1 (2024); SAFFA 1958 (see note 1).
See Hans Bernoulli, “Die Bauten der SAFFA und die Schweizer Frauenkunst,” Architektur und Kunst 15, no. 8, (1928): 225–71.
See Mariette Beyeler, La SAFFA (Schweiz. Ausstellung für Frauenarbeit) de 1958 à Zurich: son architecture et ses architectes, PhD diss., (Lausanne: EPFL, 1999); Eliana Perotti and Katia Frey, Erfindungsreich, modern und kostengünstig. Die Bauphilosophie der ephemeren Ausstellungsbauten an der Saffa 1958, k+a 73, no. 2 (2022); Eliana Perotti, ed., Saffa 1958: Eine nationale Bühne für Schweizer Architektinnen und Gestalterinnen. Städtebau, Architektur und Ausstellungsdesign im internationalen Kontext (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, forthcoming).
See Julius Wagner, ed., Das goldene Buch der LA 1939 (Zurich: Verkehrsverlag, 1939); Martin Hürlimann and Paul Ganz, Die Schweiz im Spiegel der Landesausstellung 1939, 2 vols. (Zurich: Atlantis Verlag, 1940). The focus was not on a miniature imitation of rural Switzerland, but on forward-looking modernity with new building types and technologies.
Saffa 58, ed., Saffa 1958: 2. Ausstellung. Die Schweizer Frau, ihr Leben, ihre Arbeit. Offizieller Führer mit Ausstellerverzeichnis und Orientierungsplan, exh. cat. (Zürich, 1958).
Lisbeth Sachs studied architecture at ETH Zurich in the 1930s and was one of the most influential female architects of modern Swiss architecture. As women were not granted the right to work on public commissions at the time, she often collaborated with male colleagues. Lisbeth Sachs worked with the architect Werner Müller, who was known for his unconventional and utopian projects. See Rahel Hartmann Schweizer, Lisbeth Sachs: Architektin, Forscherin, Publizistin (Zürich: gta Verlag, 2020).
Das Werk 39, no. 9 (September 1952).
