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AVDAK 2526: Where the Forehead Touches the Sky - Proposals for Szeemann’s Unbuilt Pavilion for Monte Verità

AVDAK 2526: Where the Forehead Touches the Sky – Proposals for Szeemann’s Unbuilt Pavilion for Monte Verità

Tutors: Arnaud Hendrickx & Richard Venlet
Campus BXL
Language EN & NL
Engagement: Mediating Tactics
Semester 3

Short Description

The 2526 edition of the Academic Design Office AVDAK (Architecture For, By, and As Art) culminates in an exhibition and a publication in which each student develops a proposal for Harald Szeemann’s unbuilt pavilion on Monte Verità.

Harald Szeemann (1) is an influential Swiss curator, artist, and art historian who curated more than 200 exhibitions.  The project takes as its point of departure Szeemann’s unrealised dream: to establish a Pavilion of Contemporary Art — or alternatively a sculpture park — on Monte Verità. By treating the legendary curator as a “virtual commissioner,” students are invited to engage with his associative method, his archival sensibility, and his relentless pursuit of artistic experiment.

The site itself, Monte Verità in Ascona (2), embodies a century of utopian ambition: from the “vegetable cooperative” and light-and-air huts, to sanatorium architecture, communal gardens, and Rudolf Laban’s open-air dance courses (3). As a stage where architectural challenges such as social utopia, utopia of seclusion, vernacular building, the therapeutic capacity of the (un)built environment, and spatial-artistic practices like performance and other radical art practices converged, it continues to offer fertile ground for architectural speculation.

Designing in dialogue with this history, the studio challenges students to imagine architectures that operate as propositions and provocations rather than solely as buildings: mental as well as physical spaces that test how a “pavilion” can trigger, embody, or stage ideas.

By combining Szeemann’s visionary practice, Monte Verità’s layered history, and the architectural imagination of a new generation, Where the Forehead Touches the Sky reactivates an unfinished dream for the 21st century.

Extended Description

The Academic Design Office AVDAK (Architecture For, By, and As Art), initiated by Wim Goossens and Arnaud Hendrickx, is a platform where the overlapping fields of architecture and art are explored through project-based work. As much as possible, the studio acts as or mimics a design office, working on concrete design and research-by-design opportunities.

For the 2526 edition, we invite visual artist Richard Venlet to join the team. Together with Alice Babini and Zygmunt Borawski, Venlet previously worked on the mythical site of Monte Verità at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio (4). We now bring this investigation to Campus Sint-Lucas, where we expand a fascinating fragment into a central question: Harald Szeemann’s unbuilt pavilion for Monte Verità.

Issue

At moments of social and cultural turbulence, architecture has often been drawn into the search for alternative ways of living. Around 1900, challenges of globalisation, unbridled capitalism, social inequality, and rapid technological change echoed concerns that remain urgent today. In response, communities of artists, anarchists, feminists, and reformers withdrew from the industrialised world to experiment with new forms of life. Nowhere did these aspirations culminate more radically than on Monte Verità, a hillside above Ascona where vegetarianism, nudism, sanatoria, experimental dance, and esoteric spirituality converged into a living laboratory of utopia.

Monte Verità presents a unique architectural challenge: it condenses a history of seclusion and social utopia, vernacular hut building, sanatorium architecture of air, light, and space, and artistic practices where drawing, performance, and installation blur disciplinary boundaries. In the late 20th century, Swiss curator Harald Szeemann reactivated this layered history with his seminal exhibition La mammelle della verità (1978), installed in Casa Anatta (5) as a “total artwork of history.” Later, he dreamt of extending this vision into the future through a Pavilion of Contemporary Art — a project never realised.

Case

This studio takes Szeemann’s dream of establishing a Pavilion of Contemporary Art — or alternatively a sculpture park — on Monte Verità as its commission, and Szeemann himself — both as spirit and as attitude — as its virtual commissioner.

Method

Students will appropriate Szeemann’s associative method, archival sensibility, and curatorial imagination to develop new architectural responses to his unbuilt pavilion. Each project becomes both a design and a conversation piece, staging architecture not only as construction but as proposition, speculation, and experiment.

Monte Verità will be approached not only as a historical site but as an unfinished project — a cultural landscape layered with social, architectural, and artistic experiments. Students will:

  1. Study and select – Identify aspects of Monte Verità’s history and interpret them through Szeemann’s curatorial lens.
  2. Project and propose – Translate this into an architectural speculation that also functions as a curatorial gesture. Proposals may take the form of buildings, installations, drawings, performances, or hybrids, as long as they remain anchored in architectural thinking.

Throughout, Szeemann acts as a filter and virtual client: his texts, exhibition projects, and archival traces guide the process. The assignment is not a reconstruction but a contemporary reading:

  • How could such a pavilion take form today, in dialogue with the genius loci of Monte Verità?
  • What positions could it embody — architectural, ideological, ecological, artistic?
  • How might it function as a critical standpoint in a charged context?

Output

The studio culminates in an exhibition and a publication in collaboration with Foundation Monte Verità  and CIVA (TBC). Each student contributes an individual project documented in an eight-page spread, and together the works reimagine Szeemann’s unbuilt pavilion as a polyphonic vision for the 21st century.

Schedule

  • 23 September 2025 – Start of semester, with presentations by Alice Babini and Richard Venlet on their Mendrisio studio about Monte Verità.
  • Third week – Study trip to Ascona, allowing students to directly engage with the site while developing their proposals.

References/Further reading:

Image:
Original exhibition poster for Monte Verità, Ascona – Der Berg der Wahrheit, Kunsthaus Zürich, 17 November 1978 – 28 January 1979 © Fondo Harald Szeemann, Archivio di Stato, Bellinzona