Rem Koolhaas, director of the 14th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, casts scorn in myriad directions in this three-headed hydra of a show, ambitiously entitled Fundamentals. His approach, we learn from the torrent of print drenching the pavilions, advances various socio-critical goals. National identity, a notion that underlies the very Biennale concept, is deemed obsolete in a globalized world. Previous Biennales, heavy on form, are implicitly condemned. Architecture is exposed as thoroughly constrained by how inextricably embedded it is in other social phenomena. Architects are declared largely impotent to affect the economic, political, and social forces shaping buildings. “We may posture as geniuses,” Koolhaas writes, “but we play our assigned role in the uberscript of modernization.”
The 2014 Biennale, which opened on June 7 and runs through November 23, has three parts. For the national pavilions—clustered primarily in Venice’s Giardini, a Napoleon-era public garden, and Arsenale, a former shipyard of the Venetian Navy—Koolhaas instructed curators to investigate how the countries they represent have dealt with modernization under the umbrella title Absorbing Modernity: 1914–2014. In a second section, also in the Arsenale, Monditalia curators developed an achronological multimedia extravaganza highlighting Italian architecture’s cross-fertilization with other forms of cultural expression in a display of architectural, artistic, and intellectual oddities and glories from Ticino to Sicily.
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