Sarah Williams Goldhagen

At the Venice Biennale, Rem Koolhaas urges visitors to look at architecture’s fundamentals, but exactly what is he asking us to consider? In the Central Pavilion in Venice’s Giardini, Rem Koolhaas and his curatorial team have broken down architecture into 15 basic “elements.” The Ceiling display pairs the dome in the pavilion, painted in 1909 by Galileo Chini and newly restored, with its contemporary counterpart, the dropped ceiling. 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