Winner of an Honorable Mention in the 2014 Awards competition, Christian Kerez, was nominated by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia to exhibit at the Swiss Pavilion at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition. The architect and professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) aims to investigate the possibilities — technically, as much as in our imagination — of how to think, build and experience architecture differently.

Instead of showcasing a completed building or a traditional design proposal, Incidental Space offered an immersive, abstract environment intended to explore the potential of architecture to express the unknown. It posed a central question: how can architecture represent what cannot be explicitly described?

To create the structure, Kerez used an experimental digital design process that translated a highly complex, seemingly organic geometry into a tangible spatial volume. The installation was formed using a combination of photographic scans, hand-crafted negatives, 3D milling, and thin concrete shell casting techniques. The resulting space resembled a cavernous interior—simultaneously natural and artificial, foreign and familiar.

The project marked the first time that the Swiss Pavilion at the Biennale was used to stage such an unconventional, architecture-as-installation concept. Incidental Space highlighted how architectural thought can evolve when divorced from programmatic constraints and instead focused on pure spatial perception and experience.

Ultimately, the project proposed that architecture can be more than the design of functional spaces—it can also be an exploration of the boundaries of the imaginable. As Kerez explained, “the intention was not to represent something already known, but to create a space that opens up a new experience.”