Highlights From Venice Architecture Biennale 2014.

The Venice Biennale has been one of the world’s most prestigious cultural institutions for over a century, alternating each year between hosting Art and Architecture exhibitions. This year, the 14th International Architecture Exhibition takes place from 7 June to 23 November at the Giardini, the Arsenale and various other venues throughout Venice. The title chosen for the exhibition by this year’s curator & prominent Dutch architect, Rem Koolhaas, is Fundamentals.

Fundamentals consists of three interlocking exhibitions: Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014 – an invitation to the national pavilions to show the process of the erasure of national characteristics; Elements of Architecture, in the Central Pavilion, which pays close attention to the fundamentals of our buildings used by any architect, anywhere, anytime; and Monditalia dedicates the Arsenale to a single theme – Italy – with exhibitions, events, and theatrical productions.

Here is a selection of some of my favourite things on show this year. You’re welcome.

Related Articles:
Highlights From The 55th Venice Biennale 2013.
All posts relating to Venice Biennale on Yellowtrace.

Video courtesy of crane.tv.

Luminarie at ‘Monditalia’ // Arsenale Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2014. Luminaire.

The show, titled Monditalia, fills the Corderie in Venice’s Arsenale pavilion, including views of Italian architecture, as well as art, film, dance performances, and other programmes. The goal, according to Rem Koolhaas, is to present a portrait of Italy as a “fundamental” country, a characterisation he explains as a place with a singular history but one that also faces challenges found in many other parts of the world. Shown above is the spectacular ‘Luminaire’ entry – a collaboration between OMA with Swarovski.

Photography © Gilbert McCarragher & Architectural Record.

‘La Maison Dom-ino’ // Pavilion in the Giardini at the Venice Biennale 2014.

Among the national pavilions in the Giardini, the Architectural Association School in London commissioned a 1:1 scale model of Dom-ino, a realisation of the legendary, never-built Maison Dom-ino, designed by Le Corbusier in 1914 . Project architect Valentin Bontjes van Beek worked with Sreerag Palangat Veetil, Joshua Penk, Thomas Weaver, and engineer Juerg Stauffer to build the engineered-timber structure. The structural system allowed by the new materials and the search for broader flexibility distributive allows the theorisation of a new way of living, as well as the testing of all variants that modernity has so far allowed.

Photo by Giorgio Zucchiatti.

‘Fundamentalists and Other Arab Modernisms’ // Kingdom of Bahrain Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2014.

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.

Images © Andrea Avezzù,  Courtesy of la Biennale di Venezia.

‘Interior’ // Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2014.

By focusing on the architecture of interiors, Inaki Ábalos, the curator of this year’s Spanish Pavilion, 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.”

Photography © Nico Saieh.

‘Visibility (Imposed Modernity)’ // Kosovo Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2014.

For the Republic of Kosovo the forms of modernity were the symbols of the authoritarianism of the regime, and have never been assimilated by the society. 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. (P.S. I have pretty fkn strong personal and political views on this one, but I shall carry on graciously and bite my tongue in the name of design, k?)

Images © Nico Saieh.

‘Interiors, Notes and Figures’ // Belgium Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2014.

The curators of the Belgian Pavilion visited 260 homes around the country, using their findings to produce a minimal recreation of common domestic architecture within their Venice biennale exhibition. Architects Sébastien Martinez Barat, Bernard Dubois and Sarah Levy worked with curator Judith Wielander on the Interiors. Notes and Figures project, which focusses on the domestic interiors of Belgian homes to tell the story of the country’s vernacular of the last century.

Photography © Maxime Delvaux.

‘Monolith Controversies’ // Chile Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2014.

This piece of concrete represents a relatively marginal tradition in the historiographies of modern architecture. The panel becomes a fundamental symbol to the absorption of modernity proposed as the concept for the exhibition. ‘Monolith Controversies’ is a work by Pedro Alonso and Hugo Palmarola based in a research project documenting the 153 housing blocks built in Chile by the KPD plant, as well as the technical, typological and conceptual reconstruction of twenty-eight large-concrete panel systems developed and disseminated worldwide between 1931 and 1981.

Photography © Nico Saieh.

‘Forms of Freedom: African Independence and Nordic Models’ // The Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2014.

The Nordic Pavilion exhibition explores and documents how modern Nordic architecture was an integral part of Nordic aid to East Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. The Pavilion created by Sverre Fehn shows visitors the finest Nordic social-democratic architecture built in East Africa. Architecture looking towards building a free, safe future based on the education of young generations. “Forms of Freedom” is an exhibition that showcases the highly political, incisive role of architecture in those years.

Photography © Nico Saieh.

‘Acquiring Modernity’ // Kuwait Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2014.

Photo © Andrea Avezzù.

Photo © Andrea Avezzù.

Photo © Sergio Grazia.

‘Acquiring Modernity’ in the Kuwaiti Pavilion aims to (as the website states) “…restage the celebratory opening of the Kuwait National Museum. During the rest of the six-month exhibition, the team will continue developing their investigations concerning the role of the institution towards a more meaningful definition of its program(s), preferably in unison with the renovation efforts that began in April 2014 between the NCCAL and Pace to resuscitate the currently underused building. Encouraging an expanded understanding of architectural heritage that is inclusive of modernist structures is also an important objective of this project. We ask ourselves, what is the future of heritage in Kuwait?”

‘Lest We Forget’ // UAE Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2014.

‘Lest We Forget: Structures of Memory in the United Arab Emirates,’ 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.

Images © Nico Saieh.

’14-14′ // Serbia Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2014.

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.

Photography © Relja Ivanić.

‘Condemned to be Modern’ // Mexico Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2014.

“Condemned to be modern” is presented as a chronological outline of 1914-2014 of Mexican architecture, brought by the team composed of July Gaeta, Luby Springall, historian Catherine R. Ettinger, museographer Salvador Quiroz and designer Gustavo Avilés. The result is 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.

Watch the ‘Condemned to be Modern’ installation video here.

Photography © Andrea Avezzù.

‘Fitting Abstraction’ // Croatian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2014.

‘Fitting Abstraction’ 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. ‘Fitting Abstraction’ demonstrates the ways in which modernism reinforced an existing design culture that extended its historical trajectories up to the present day.

Image © Andrea Avezzù.

‘OfficeUS’ // US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2014.

The US pavilion houses both a repository of information about the history of architectural firms in the US and serves as the base of operations for a new architectural firm that was created solely for this year’s biennale. OfficeUS reframes the history of US architecture though the lens of export while placing the future of the office at the centre of the story. The research, collected into booklets, lines the walls of the space. While visitors mill around the pavilion, the members of OfficeUS work at specially designed tables.

Photography © Nico Saieh.

Related Articles:
Highlights From The 55th Venice Biennale 2013.
All posts relating to Venice Biennale on Yellowtrace.