“I Love Chalets” explores transformations of the Swiss Chalet through representation. For hundreds of years this building typology has travelled through media: first through memories and stories, later through sketches and pattern books, and now through digital photographs. Today the chalet has taken on newfound forms and associations that modify the buildings’ identity. This exhibition showcases some of these changes and how imagery – through new visual technologies and design methodologies – expand on how the chalet is seen today. The work on show is a curation of the evolving chalet typology, including design guidelines from an immigrant town in the USA, a collection of pattern books and children’s novels, chalets constructed through AI – artificial intelligence –, and buildings from an alpine village in Switzerland.

By bringing together works from governmental archives, photographers, architects, and historians, the show takes a new look at how the Swiss Chalet reflects around the world and back. Models by Swiss American curators Nicole McIntosh and Jonathan Louie from Architecture Office are shown alongside photographs by Brian Griffin documenting the town of New Glarus, Wisconsin. In contrast photographs by Patrick Lambertz display anonymous Chalets in Switzerland. An installation by the EPFL Design x Media Lab displays the extents of Chalet imagery through AI, while the collages by architectural historian Nicola Braghieri feature a series of Chalet variations as photomontage. And works by different architects from a new neighbourhood in Andermatt, Uri show how the Chalet style shapes the appearance of an Alpine village today. I Love Chalets is an exhibition for those that embrace the charming identity of the Swiss chalet and the personal love that has driven the evolution of its form over time.