The 14th International Architecture Exhibition, was open to the public from June 7 through November 23, 2014, in the Giardini and the Arsenale. The Architecture Biennale theme titled “Fundamentals”, Rem Koolhaas describes Fundamentals an exhibition that consists of three main components:
65 National Participations was exhibiting in the historic pavilions in the Giardini, the Arsenale, and the city of Venice. Among these, 10 countries was participating in the Exhibition for the first time: Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Morocco, Mozambique, New Zealand, and Turkey.
22 official Collateral Events, approved by the Director of the International Exhibition and promoted by international institutions,hold their exhibitions and initiatives in various locations in the city.
Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014
Absorbing Modernity 1914–2014 has been proposed for the contribution of all the pavilions, and they too are involved in a substantial part of the overall research project, whose title is Fundamentals. The history of the past one hundred years prelude to the Elements of Architecture section hosted in the Central Pavilion, where the curator offers the contemporary world those elements that should represent the reference points for the discipline: for the architects but also for its dialogue with clients and society.
Examine key moments from a century of modernization. Together, the presentations start to reveal how diverse material cultures and political environments transformed a generic modernity into a specific one. Participating countries show, each in their own way, a radical splintering of modernities in a century where the homogenizing process of globalization appeared to be the master narrative.
Highlight of National Pavilions
Pavilion of Antarctica: Antarctopia
The display presents speculative and built work relating to the Antarctic territory, including projects by leading architects like Zaha Hadid, Juergen Mayer H and Alexander Brodsky.
Pavilion of Austria:
The Austrian pavilion is an intriguing look into national halls of power, or parliament buildings. Arranged in a grid on the pavilion walls, 196 miniature scale models of these powerful places offer a fascinating look into this architectural typology.
Pavilion of Bahrain: Fundamentalists and Other Arab Modernisms
The pavilion of the Kingdom of Bahrain presents a survey on the modern architectural models imposed to the Arab world by the European colonialism. From the Algiers master-plan to the Soviet Union influence on the urban transformations of Damascus, and the Deco architecture built with mud bricks in Baghdad; modern style architecture has been perceived as an alien element although somehow adapted to the local tradition models during the 1950s and 1970s.
Pavilion of Belgium: Intérieurs, notes et figures
Belgian pavilion is the work of a curatorial group formed by Sébastien Martinez Barat, Bernard Dubois, Sarah Levy and Judith Wielander. The exhibition focusses on the domestic interiors of Belgian homes to tell the story of the country’s vernacular of the last century. Visited 260 homes around the country, using their findings to produce a minimal recreation of common domestic architecture within their Venice biennale exhibition. Celebrates the everyday and mundane in the domestic sphere. The displays are beautiful abstract interpretations of real-life Belgian homes.
Pavilion of Brazil: Modernity As Tradition
The Brazilian pavilion offers a thorough look into the evolution of Brazilian architecture over the past century. Everything is organised into architectural typologies – housing, civic buildings, education, landscaping – and, in response to Koolhaas’ theme, examines modernism in Brazilian architecture.
Pavilion of Canada: Arctic Adaptations: Nunavut at 15
The Canadaian pavilion plunging the viewer into the frozen north to see the ways in which conventional modernity has been challenged by culture and climate in the vastness of Nunavut’s two million square kilometres. The display celebrates the 15th anniversary of Nunavut’s founding with a look at how architecture could re-engage with communities in this remote but beautiful territory.
Pavilion of Chile: Monolith Controversies
Monolith Controversies traces the country’s brush with mass-produced housing, focusing on prefabricated concrete building systems. Complete with models, photographs and a meticulous reconstruction of a typical apartment using the KPD system, the exhibition brings home the ramifications of treating the home as a machine for living in.
Pavilion of Croatia: Fitting Abstraction
“Fitting Abstraction” demonstrates the ways in which modernism reinforced an existing design culture that extended its historical trajectories up to the present day. The pavilion exhibits eight fundamental attributes of Croatian architecture culture that persist as decisive qualities throughout the hundred year period, constructing the platform for the effective identity formation. It explores how architecture, through its disciplinary autonomy, responded to the intense conditions of globally impending modernity.
Pavilion of France: Modernity: promise or menace?
The pavilion contrasts this witty interpretation of the modern lifestyle with grim documentaries about the alienation of the country’s concrete banlieues. Arranged around a spectacular model of Jacques Lagrange’s Villa Arpel, designed for Jacques Tati’s film Mon Oncle. Also included are the exquisitely engineered (but ultimately failed) visions of Jean Prouvé and an examination of the modern house in postwar France.
Pavilion of Germany: Bungalow Germania
Bungalow Germania is about the juxtapositions of architecture and national identity. The style of the pavilion change to more egalitarian, progressive modernism. The grand installation that entirely fills a sober neo-classical pavilion, giving a spatial experience of ideological contrasts.
Pavilion of Great Britain: A Clockwork Jerusalem
A Clockwork Jerusalem is a journey through the esoteric subcurrents of British architecture. Images like Ballard, bomb sites, Banham, Barbara Jones or the Barbican, comes together to create a vast semiotic wonderland, an everything-is-connected narrative that makes some sense of the UK’s obsession with the utopia of ruins.
Pavilion of Italy: Innesti/grafting
Grafting tracks the fusion of Italian modernism with the country’s vast, varied architectural tradition. Paired with a large-scale display of some of the most notable new buildings in Italy, Grafting is a curious hybrid of historical survey and flag-waving celebration.
Pavilion of Japan: In the real world
In the Real World delves into architecture research, a show of startling richness, assembling 100 years’ worth of researched drawings, models and photographs. The exhibition chronicle the response of Japanese architects to their own vernacular and, as time went on, to ideas and aesthetics of the burgeoning modernist scene.
Pavilion of Korea: Crow’s Eye View: The Korean Peninsula
Golden Lion award for best pavilion
Crow’s Eye View, a conceptual exploration of how this divided peninsula can ever come together again, and what role architecture has to play. Arranged as many separate elements, the show includes a fascinating collection of North Korean propoganda posters and a survey of Western photographic tropes dealing with Pyongyang.
Pavilion of Kosovo: Visibility (imposed modernity)
The installation shkëmbi tower, made by stacking 720 “shkëmbi”, a traditional stool which name also means rock, emphasises the recovering of memory as a necessary step toward Kosovo’s advancement.
Pavilion of Kuwait: Acquiring Modernity
The Kuwaiti Pavilion encouraging an expanded understanding of architectural heritage that is inclusive of modernist structures, in unison with the renovation efforts that began in April 2014 between the NCCAL and Pace to resuscitate the currently underused building.
Pavilion of Mexico: …condenados a ser modernos
The Mexican pavilion shows a rich architectural production in a bright ellipse in which numerous architectural works, interviews and historical events are projected. In an elliptical screen placed in the centre of the room videos featuring more than 70 works, interviews and historical events are planned.
Pavilion of Nordic Pavilion (Norway, Finland, Sweden): Forms of Freedom. African Independence and Nordic Models
In collaboration with the Museum of Finnish Architecture, the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design and architecture practice Space Group, the show explores the role of Nordic architecture in East African aid throughout the 1960s and 1970s (in particular Tanzania, Kenya and Zambia), which included city planning, infrastructure and industry.
Pavilion of Russia: Fair Enough: Russia’s Past Our Present
Entitled “Fair Enough”, repurposed a century of architectural experimentation as a trade fair, lovingly assembled with bright graphics, clashing colours, an off-the-shelf cubicle display system.
Pavilion of Serbia: 14-14
Serbia is represented by a project titled ’14-14,’the daylight-filled interior of the exhibition space is a framework for a hundred significant architectural projects between 1914 and 2014, while the surroundings are dedicated to the project of the Museum of the Revolution of Nations and Nationalities of Yugoslavia by the Croatian architect Vjenceslav Richter.
Pavilion of Spain: Interior
Spanish Pavilion focusing on the architecture of interiors, highlights the spaces within 12 Spanish buildings. These projects, mostly completed within the past three years, serve as specifically important instances of refurbishment and regeneration of Spain’s built heritage. The exhibition is a study not only of the architecture itself, but of the cultural material that gave rise to the specific forms. Through large-scale photographs and sections of each of the presented spaces, Interior seeks “the place where life unfolds, the central theme of architecture.”
Pavilion of Switzerland: Lucius Burckhardt and Cedric Price. A stroll through a fun palace
A place of conversation and exploration anchored around retrospectives of Lucius Burckhardt and Cedric Price. The latter, a British iconoclast best known for his unbuilt urban visions, is represented by a reconstruction of his expansive archive. Meanwhile the Swiss sociologist Burckhardt contributes his writings about architecture and planning. The texts and drawings are supported by two installations by Herzog & de Meuron and Atelier Bow-Wow.
Pavilion of Turkey: Places of Memory
The Pavilion uses sound, photography and models to explore three districts of Istanbul, focusing on the spaces and places that are often overlooked but which nevertheless provide a solid definition of this historic city.
Pavilion of United Arab Emirates: Lest We Forget: Structures of Memory in the United Arab Emirates
The UAE pavilion presents the seminal findings of a larger initiative to archive the history of architectural and urban development in the UAE over the past century. The exhibition examines how public and residential architecture, built within a rapidly expanding urban context, shaped the newly established federation and prepared the foundation for its emergence on a global stage.
Pavilion of United States Of America: OFFICEUS
US Pavilion shows an installation, as the name suggests, like an office. The pavilion also hosts an outdoor event space, lectures, workshops and a collective workspace with a feature wall of architectural documentation from 1,000 buildings and 200 offices.
Elements of Architecture
Elements of Architecture looks under a microscope at the fundamentals of our buildings, used by any architect, anywhere, anytime: the floor, the wall, the ceiling, the roof, the door, the window, the façade, the balcony, the corridor, the fireplace, the toilet, the stair, the escalator, the elevator, the ramp.
The exhibition is a selection of the most revealing, surprising, and unknown moments from a new book, Elements of Architecture, that reconstructs the global history of each element. It brings together ancient, past, current, and future versions of the elements in rooms that are each dedicated to a single element. To create diverse experiences, we have recreated a number of very different environments, archive, museum, factory, laboratory, mock-up, simulation…
Ceiling
The first space beyond the front porch of the Central Pavilion is devoted to the ceiling, articulated in two types: solid and hollow. Hollow is found in the drop ceiling and its normally hidden infrastructure of ductwork and other services. Symbolic meaning gives way to pure mechanics. This first space in the Central Pavilion sets up the dichotomy of the EOA show, historical versus modern, as well as the way the elements are surgically revealed and technically discussed.
The Intro room
Past the octagonal room devoted to the ceiling is the Central Pavilion’s central space, which houses an introduction to the rest of the exhibition. It hints to the visitor that the exhibit is geared to non-architects as much as to professionals, without limiting the displays to things only graspable by architects.
Window
A small collection of the thousands of old windows in the vast Brooking National Collection covers one wall in the room to the left of the central space. The wood frames, pointed arches, and divided lights are in clear contrast to the rest of the room, which is an odd assortment of what goes into the making of modern windows. There is factory equipment from Belgian window fitting manufacturer Sobinco in the middle of the space.
Corridor
The previously open spaces of the Ceiling, Intro and Window give way to the divided room devoted to the corridor. The corridors cut diagonally across the square room in sometimes maze, like configurations. Given this layout, exit signs are displayed throughout, some of them projected on the floor. At one of end of the main corridor are monitors displaying five “Building Exodus” evacuation simulations by One Simulations, one actually devoted to the Central Pavilion in its current layout.
Floor
At the ends of the diagonal corridors are stairs that wind up to a mezzanine that is covered with a unitized raised flooring; the system is often used in office buildings to allow power, data and other infrastructure to be flexibly routed. Some if the floor’s squares are removed or glassed-in to reveal a robotic vacuum making its way throughout the otherwise hidden underworld of what Koolhaas calls the floorspace.
Balcony
The balcony is saturated with images and color; the orange stair connecting the two spaces hints at this before even entering. Althought balcony is not as necessary as a floor for standing on or a window for admitting light and air, the balcony is presented in political element as well as an architectural one. The traditional mashrabiya projecting into the central space is now seen from the other side, a counter to the modern Bauhaus balcony that, painted orange, reveals much behind its thin railings.
Façade
Façade is s the most part that reflects contemporary elements. Full-scale mockups of planted, precast, rainscreen and other façades sit in the middle of the room, while historical newspaper clippings with stories implicating historical façade development are mounted on the walls. The façade research is carried out with Princeton University’s Alejandro Zaera Polo, who describes the installation as aiming for the understanding of dynamic ecologies of materials and technologies, their diffusion, application, and environmental adaptation.
Fireplace
Fireplace as one of the many elements competing for origin-of-architecture status, but not necessary element from most new buildings. This part shows prehistoric EOA is depicted as a “part real, part fake” hearth from 228,000 years ago; a 3D-printed version of a Piranesi design depicts the aristocratic fireplace of the 19th century; the last of the triumvirate points to the future in MIT SENSEable Cities Lab’s “Local Warming,” where sensors and ceiling panels provide targeted warmth to whomever walks below.
Wall
Wall is the vertical element that defines the extents of rooms is separated into two types: the bearing wall and the partition wall. In this room, the former’s combination of structure and enclosure is evident at one end of the space in the remnants of a 17th-century Dutch house that was destroyed by a plane crash. At the other end of the room is a kinetic skin wall designed by Germany’s Barkow Leibinger, where motors drive telescoping rods that push and pull the fabric surface and make walking by it a sometimes intimate experience. In between are parallel walls that gradually make the shift from bearing to partition, heavy to light, solid to transparent, static to kinetic.
Toilet
This room shows a row of stalls appropriately traces the history of “evacuation” in the Toilet room, where clear glass and frosted glass partitions express the shift from communal/social to private/personal through history. The toilets on display reach from a chariot latrine in the Roman baths at Caracalla to a smart toilet with its warming seat, sound effects, deodorizing features and even wifi capabilities.
Escalator
The escalator as the single device that has transformed our cities most, it has transformed our architecture, our urbanism, our infrastructures, our movements, ultimately, our consciousness. In this room respectively presents the axonometric maps of the walkways connected by escalators in Hong Kong from the great book Cities Without Ground, showing the escalator’s urban implications, and highly detailed escalator sections at full-scale on the walls, revealing how its precise mechanics.
Elevator
The elevator plays an important role, enabling the skyscraper and its diverse vertical layering of stacked floors. The sparse room in the Central Pavilion is occupied by an Eindhoven University of Technology Robotics prototype of an elevator that can move horizontally as well as vertically.The capsule that rescued the trapped Chilean miners in 2010 anchors one corner of the room, recalling the elevator’s industrial origins.
Stair
Stairs are making a comeback as an aid to fitness; numerous recent projects that encourage the use of stairs over elevators through their design and location come to mind, such as Morphosis’s Cooper Union building and OMA’s own Casa Da Musica. The exhibition’s stair research, evidenced by drawings, scale models, full-size models, and a film.
Ramp
The ramp as a speculative springboard, constantly pulled down by realities. The room shows two aspects of the ramp, design ideas and code realities, are expressed via full-scale constructions on either side of the room. Claude Parent’s “living on inclined planes” occupies one side, inviting visitors to lounge on the soft surfaces.
Roof
The room shows a continuation of Koolhaas’s efforts in last year’s Bi-City Biennale in Shenzhen, China, the attempted yields blue-foam models that are suspended in the room. In addition to the contemporary, cross-cultural translation of traditional forms, some parametric designs illustrate recent forms modeled, engineered and fabricated through the help of computers.
Door
The room devoted to doors, more portals await inside the room, in the form of full-scale mockups of doors from architectural treatises erected out of foam. One side of the room is devoted to an “airport security diorama,” erected in parallel layers of foam.
Monditalia
In a moment of crucial political change, we decided to look at Italy as a “fundamental” country, completely unique but also emblematic of a global situation where many countries are balancing between chaos and a realization of their full potential. The Arsenale presents a scan of Italy, established by 82 films, 41 architectural projects, and a merger of architecture with la biennale’s dance, music, theatre, and film sections. Each project in Monditaliaconcerns unique and specific conditions but together form a comprehensive portrait of the host country
Monditalia section in the Corderie with 41 research projects, reminds us of the complexity of this reality without complacency or prejudice, which is paradigmatic of what happens elsewhere in the world; complexities that must be deliberately experienced as sources of regeneration. Dance, Music, Theatre and Cinema with the programmes of our directors (Virgilio Sieni, Ivan Fedele, Àlex Rigola and Alberto Barbera) participate in the life of the section, with debates and seminars along the six-month duration of the exhibition.
Collateral events
Across Chinese Cities – Beijing
Arsenale Nord, T Organization: Beijing Design Week
Over the centuries the strategic imagination of Chinese rulers has forged a policy culture privileging locality and flexibility, where decentralization and self-governance were encouraged as a conduit towards a system of controlled autonomies expanding from the centre outwards into the peripheries. Across Chinese Cities – Beijing is an investigation into the capital’s spatial program woven into its ‘otherly modern’ project (Hay, Double Modernity, Para-Modernity, 2008). The exhibition situates its traces by taking the historical district of Dashilar as a case study, while making resonant the sedimental knowledge of archetypal and architectural past throughout the city from the early 1600s.
Adaptation
Palazzo Zen, Organization: EMG•ART Foundation
Adaptation focuses on how Chinese architects negotiate shifting constraints imposed by contexts, clients and capital. Their work is apt for change, revealing a new understanding of craft and building cultures, imposed by modern interpretations of traditional spatial concepts, revitalization of industrial heritage, and reactions to remote geographies. Through the media of models, photographs and short films, Adaptation presents a profession in progress across multiple generations. Curated by Marino Folin & MovingCities, the exhibition takes place at Palazzo Zen, a cultural venue of EMG•ART.
Air Fundamental: Collision between inflatable and architecture
Arsenale Nord, Organization: Scuola di Architettura di Siracusa SDS, Università di Catania
The installation Air Fundamental is a “pneumatic architecture”, realized by students after a series of researches, held in the venue of Ortiga with the participation of the entire community of Syracuse School of Architecture. This project explores the adjustment capacity of a flexible space (inflatable) placed inside pre-existing architectures. This occasion turned the school building into a field for experimentation, activating instantaneous areas essential for temporary events (shows, exhibitions, conferences…) or even some workshops.
Fundamentally Hong Kong? DELTA FOUR 1984 – 2044
Arsenale, Organization: The Hong Kong Institute of Architects; Hong Kong Arts Development Council
Hong Kong and neighbouring Pearl River Delta is arguably one of the most complex, controversial and contemporary spatial developments in history and today. Eleven compact cities are rapidly connecting one another to form a seamless ‘one-hour living zone’. Travelling through border and crossing, land and water, home and community, marriage and departure, four short films capture stories and actors who live and move between these emerging locales and systems. In Venice and beyond, we invite the world’s wisdom and imagination for new possibilities of architecture, a practice of social innovation.
Gotthard Landscape – The Unexpected View
Palazzo Trevisan degli Ulivi, Organization: ETH Zurich – Department of Architecture; AAM Accademia di architettura Mendrisio, Università della Svizzera italiana
Two schools of architecture present the event with the support from Pro Helvetia. The Scientifically Based Appropriation of the Landscape. The project deals with the passage from a factual and territorial oriented tradition in the Alps, towards a virtual territorial principle based on a scientific appropriation of the landscape. Our own landscape vision of the Alps is thus dematerializing and acquiring the visual character of an interactive digital sculpture. The transparency and “liquefaction” of territorial reality through point cloud digitalization invites us to a completely new way of seeing. Its virtual character the diaphanous “technical” coloring of the topological surface provokes an uncommon artistic and aesthetic fascination.
Grafting Architecture. Catalonia at Venice
Cantieri Navali, Organization: Institut Ramon Llull
Graft: 1 1 v. tr. To insert (a graft) in a branch or stem of another tree; to propagate by insertion in another stock; also, to insert a graft upon. Casa Bofarull by Josep Maria Jujol (Tarragona, 1879 – Barcelona, 1949) is the starting point for understanding an architectural approach present in many buildings where the architect is faced with a pre-existing feature (physical or otherwise) and blends the new and old layers to beget a new architecture that is able to combine them harmoniously. The proposal show the process and perception of a series of examples of Catalan architecture that begins with Jujol’s work.
“Happiness Forecourt” = “Largo da Felicidade” = “????”
Arsenale, Organization: Instituto Cultural do Governo da R.A.E. de Macau (I.C.M.)
The exhibition addresses the unique cultural hybridisation in Macao, the blending of the East and West, and many facets that reflect the dynamic mixed cultures. The urban morphology of a “forecourt”, with its various idiomatic versions, aims to convey the harmonious coexistence of two contrasting cultures, the Portuguese and Chinese, which can be observed in its unique living conditions, architectural features, which encapsulate the idea of a cultural symbiosis and manifests both countries joint effort to maintain a balanced and enduring partnership through time.
Lifting The Curtain: Central European Architectural Networks
Officina delle Zattere, Organization: Polish Modern Art Foundation (PMAF)
The exhibition investigates the role of Central European cross-national architectural networks and circles at different turning points of the 20th century. It offers a new insight on the evolution of modernism through mapping actors and different transfers across multiple borders, uncovering dynamic exchanges expanding beyond both western narratives of formative national modernity and Cold War territorial boundaries as well as the increasingly established architectural discourse of post-socialist countries. The exhibition is the first instalment of a long-term research project conducted by five Central European architectural centres.
M9 / Transforming the City
Fondazione di Venezia, Organization: Fondazione di Venezia
The exhibition presents the executive project and launch of works of the construction of M9 City District, national and international model which blend together cultural production, museum activities and innovative retail strategies. M9 covers an area of 9,200 sq.m. in the center of Mestre and includes: a new museum, the first in Europe completely dedicated to history and culture of the 20th century; a restored convent of the 17th century; an administrative building of the ‘60s. The renovation, designed by Sauerbruch Hutton Studio, conceived and entirely promoted by Fondazione di Venezia, set a new level of urban excellency and wascome catalys of the urban regeneration of Venetian mainland.
Made in Europe
Palazzo Michiel dal Brusà, Organization: Fundació Mies van der Rohe; the European Commission (Creative Europe Program)
The proposal of European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – “Mies van der Rohe Award” event Made in Europe considers history as a construe of data with a specific time signature. The exhibition is going to present a selection of 150 models and a visualization of the 2500 proposals that conform a quarter of a century of awards, representing a curate selection of the highest quality works of architecture in Europe. The concept pretends to emphasize the number, quantity and quality of the overwhelming data. Playing with the idea that the data, not subdued to the construction of the historical discourse, are free for any kind of reading or elaboration.
Masegni
Ex Chiesa di San Lorenzo, Organization: The Building Centre Trust
The remarkable and weather worn brick facade of the church of San Lorenzo appears as an eternal project, perpetually awaiting its stone cladding. It has towered over the campo for five centuries, and stands today as a notorious example of Venice’s gradual decline. Housed within this extraordinary ruined church is Masegni, an installation that addresses the themes of conservation, preservation, and dereliction prevalent in Venice. The eight meter tall ‘wall’ proposed for Masegni offers an abstracted and fragmented glimpse of how San Lorenzo’s completed facade might have looked.
The structure alludes to the constant struggle for the sinking city to maintain itself. The wall lists precariously and asymmetrically in two self supporting parts, creating a corridor for visitors to go through that is as narrow and awkward as a typical Venetian alley. This installation is an opportunity to explore the interior of this magnificent and historical building through the exhibition designed by Roz Barr Architects – visitors was allowed inside the church and experience the scale of this interior from within this crafted eight meters high wall.
Mikhail Roginsky. Beyond the Red Door
Ca’ Foscari Esposizioni, Organization: Fondazione Mikhail Roginsky
The event consists of a retrospective exhibition of outstanding Russian-French artist Mikhail Roginsky (1931-2004). The example of a particular creative evolution gives an opportunity to present a broad picture of the main trends of modernism, perceived through the individual experiences of the artist. The main objective of the project is draw attention to the fundamental component of the art of painting that is based on advantage of its inherent notions: color, form and construction.
Moskva: Urban Space
Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà, Organization: Moscow Committee for Architecture and Urban Development
The project represents the past and the present of Moscow’s architecture by both showcasing its distinctive identity and by clearly outlining its development trajectory. While the face of a twentieth century city was largely determined by the architecture of its buildings, today’s urban singularity is based on the “connective tissue” of its public spaces that have become equally important identity-makers for contemporary metropolises. This is why the present day of the Russian capital is illustrated with the project for the new cultural center and downtown landscape Zaryadye Park and by a life-size fragment of this public space.
Once upon a time in Liechtenstein
Palazzo Trevisan degli Ulivi, Organization: Liechtenstein Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Education and Culture
The dramatic transformation Liechtenstein has undergone in the past 100 years has resulted in a building stock that is almost entirely assembled from typologies and styles originating from foreign influences. The consequence is a pastiche of modern and post-modern architecture which, as an ensemble could be (mis-)read as the local building culture. This exhibition and its associated events aim to ruminate on how globally prevalent building types have been adapted to a particular local condition, and to discover how this transformative process has generated fundamental principles and values that consist in a contemporary (and future) architectural identity of Liechtenstein.
Planta
Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello di Venezia, Organization: Fundació Sorigué
Planta is the culmination of the desire to give back, to return through a balanced tension between art, institution, knowledge, ecology and manufacturing. Planta is not only a building but also a concept, a crossroads of and for ideas, an embodiment of a personality and vision and in this way, a guide for the future. Excavated and constructed from the very site it occupies, Planta provides a fixed point of reference amid the flux of an ever changing literal and abstract landscape. It is an embodiment of the values that have informed the processes in and around Planta.
«Salon Suisse»: The next 100 Years – Scenarios for an Alpine City State
Palazzo Trevisan degli Ulivi, Organization: Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia
The Salon Suisse is the accompanying programme of the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Now in its third year, the Salon Suisse, a programme of talks and events, offers a platform for exchange on contemporary architecture and thought in a relaxed atmosphere. The Salon Suisse 2014 is curated by Zurich-based architects and urbanists Hiromi Hosoya and Markus Schaefer, founders of Hosoya Schaefer Architects, who have put together an ambitious programme of events focusing on questions around urban development in Switzerland and the increasing pressure of urbanization worldwide.
The Space That Remains: Yao Jui-Chung’s Ruins Series
Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà, Organization: National Taiwan University of Arts
The exhibition touches upon the afterlife of buildings not from the position of their makers, users, or providers, but from the act of a reader. A prolific art writer, critic, photographer, painter and video artist, Yao Jui-Chung (1969-) has undertaken this Ruins project since early 1990. Out of an impressive corpus of Yao’s black and white photographs, both intense and poetic, several major series and one video have been selected, showing remnants of aboriginal structures, Han Chinese residential buildings, examples of 19th century Western-style architecture, iconic industrial ruins as well as postwar architecture on a prison island for political dissidents.
The Yenikapi Project
Zuecca Project Space, Organization: Zuecca Project Space
Zuecca Project Space is proud to present the incredible vision for The Yenikapi Transfer Point and Archaeological Park in Istanbul, designed by Peter Eisenman with his firm Eisenman Architects and Aytaç Architects. The design for the historic site includes a park, an archaeological museum, and a transit building adjacent to the new underground rail hub, construction of which uncovered important artifacts from the Roman and even neolithic eras. This exhibition highlights mercantile trade links between Venice and the 1600 year old former Theodosius Port in Yenikapi, where the remains of 35 ships was displayed as a main feature of the Archaeological Museum. On the Historic Peninsula, the Yenikapi area helps to bridge the European and Asian sides of the city.
Time Space Existence
The exhibition presents architects from 6 continents, brought together in an extraordinary combination. It shows current developments and thoughts in international architecture, presenting architects with different cultural backgrounds and who are in different stages of their careers, i.e. established architects next to architects whose works might be less known. What they have in common is their dedication to architecture in the broadest sense of their profession, presenting architecture through a focus on the concepts Time, Space and Existence.
Palazzo Bembo, San Marco, Organization: GlobalArtAffairs Foundation
Township of Domestic Parts: Made in Chinese Taiwan
Palazzo delle Prigioni, Organization: China National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA)
The exhibition Township of Domestic Parts: Made in Chinese Taiwan is a collection of nine small houses, each with one single program. Scattered inside the Palazzo delle Prigioni, it forms an interior township of misfit parts. As an engagement to Fundamentals and the absorption of Modernity, this project considers a heightened sense of the compartmentalization of interior programs, in that we journalistically distill each elemental part as its own singularity, such as the House of Sleep, House of Work, and so forth. As the houses form an interior urbanism, perhaps we gain a deeper understanding towards the plan as a drawing.
Young Architects in Africa
CA’ ASI, Palazzo Santa Maria Nova, Organization: CA’ ASI
Presenting projects by architects as well as vernacular architecture, the exhibition Young Architects in Africaunderlines the important role played by the African World today, as seen throughout its contemporary architecture. For the occasion of 14th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, the CA’ ASI open its doors to emerging African architects in order to emphasize the creativity and originality of new African architecture, and to help it gain world-wide recognition. AS.Architecture-Studio has set up CA’ ASI to promote the dialogue between architecture, contemporary art, and the Biennale visitors.
Z Club On Money, Space, Postindustrialization, And…
Palazzo Trevisan degli Ulivi, Organization: Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK)
Z Club opens when the sun sets in Venice: Every day/night from 9 pm a programme is put on in the Palazzo Trevisan degli Ulivi that offers a profile through Zurich University of the Arts for seven whole evenings. Discourse meets performances, concerts meet actions; and your physical comfort is always taken care of. The subjects “money,” “space” and “postindustrialisation” are common themes throughout the week.
Projects
“Biennale Sessions” program for universities
The “Biennale Sessions” project istaking place for the fifth consecutive year. After the extraordinary success of the previous editions, la Biennale offers for the 14th edition the “Biennale Sessions” program directed at universities, fine arts academies, and research and educational institutions in the fields of architecture, visual arts and other associations. The goal of the “Biennale Sessions” is to encourage visits to the exhibition by groups of at least 50 students and teachers who was assisted in the organization of their journey and stay. They was able to organize seminars in a space made available to them free of charge by la Biennale.
“Meetings on Architecture”
This year “Meetings on Architecture”, organized by la Biennale, was enriched during the six months of Exhibitionby a wide calendar of events, which animate the Arsenale with seven stages. The “Weekend Specials” programme is conceived as part of the section Monditalia and is developed in several forms: documentary, workshop, conference, debate and performance.
National Participations match their Pavilions’ presences with a series of live talks, debates and movie projections. Contributions to this year calendar are also given by directors of Dance, Music, Theatre and Cinema sectors of la Biennale. They develop part their Festivals and College programmes during the Exhibition, in order to represent essential elements of how architecture can intersect real life and complex spaces.