Amid the orderly grid of the Giardini della Biennale, the Swiss Pavilion appears almost reticent. Its low white volumes, completed in 1952 by Bruno Giacometti, seem to withdraw from the surrounding display of national pride. The building embodies a form of modernism that resists monumentality, where precision and restraint replace spectacle, and architecture becomes less an object than a framework for encounter.
In many ways, the middle-of-nowhere location makes sense for Brasília. It's not only the most un-Brazilian-feeling city in the country but it might also be the most un-Latin American-feeling. That's what makes it so fascinating. With an out-of-this-universe architectural vibrancy stuck somewhere between kitschy Bond films of the 1970s and Jane Fonda's "Barbarella, " Brasília is a city all its own.
