Periscope
Periscope #7: Meanwhile in Venice
With the Kurtheater in Baden, built in 1951/1952, Lisbeth Sachs (1914–2002) became the first woman architect to receive a public building commission in Switzerland. Despite this prestigious project completed not long after her graduation, Sachs’s bold and original oeuvre has received little recognition. Her groundbreaking work takes center stage in the 2025 Swiss Pavilion at the Architecture Biennale in Venice, curated by the collective of women artists and architects Annexe. As a collaborative initiative to highlight women’s cultural achievements, this year’s Venice installation thematically revisits the second Swiss Exhibition of Women’s Work (SAFFA) that took place in Zurich in 1958. For SAFFA ’58, Sachs built the Kunsthalle – a temporary art pavilion, consisting of three tangential circles with a tentlike roof construction and radially distributed walls for display. In the same year as Sachs’s Baden Kurtheater, Bruno Giacometti completed the Swiss pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale in Venice. Annexe imagines an alternative reality in which Sachs’s long-demolished SAFFA pavilion reclaims the physical space of Giacometti’s still-standing Swiss Pavilion. The clash of geometries and materialities evokes the persistent gender imbalance in the profession and in the history of architecture.
Periscope #7 displays archival materials that inform and complement Switzerland’s contribution to the 2025 Architecture Biennale in Venice. It announces not only the reimagining of Sachs’s Kunsthalle in Annexe’s current Biennale installation, but also the parallel English translation of Sachs’s monography by Rahel Hartmann Schweizer, published this year by gta Verlag. The gta Archive, actively engaged in corrective strategies and critical reflection, is a partner in both events.
2025
