14th Venice ArchitectureBiennale FundamentalsArchDaily Exclusive Coverage

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Your virtual tour of the Venice Biennale has arrived! Check out each of the national pavilions currently on display for Rem Koolhaas' chosen theme - Absorbing Modernity, 1914-2014.

To kick off our coverage of the Venice Biennale, we're bringing you photos of OfficeUS -- the United States' contribution to the national exhibitions organized under the theme of "Absorbing Modernity." The pavilion houses both a repository of information about the history of architectural firms in the US (with a focus on the US's role in exporting architecture) and serves as the base of operations for a new architectural firm that was created solely for this year's biennale. 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. The output and deliverables of the office will be determined as the Biennale progresses. We also got the chance to speak to the organizers, so stayed tuned for video interviews with the curators and designers of the US Pavilion (coming soon!). For now, however, read on to the see the curator's statement on the exhibit.

This year at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, KAAN Architecten will present a Collateral Event featuring PLANTA - a partially subterranean space that will be dedicated to multidisciplinary artistic production and built within the confines of the “La Plana del Corb” quarry in Balaguer (Lleida, Spain) by 2016. Designed for Grupo and Fundació Sorigué, PLANTA is not only a building, but a concept; a concept in which is the “culmination of the desire to give back, to return through a balanced tension between art, institution, knowledge, ecology and manufacturing.”

"European-ness Porosity" is presented as part of “MADE IN EUROPE: 25 years of the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award.”

The rise of the internet has radically changed how we inhabit space. Thus, for the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, Estonia’s pavilion will focus on how this change is applied to the practice of architecture. Titled Interspace, the exhibition will be a single room that digitally showcases the physical act of placemaking.

This year at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, the Collateral Event M9 / Transforming the City will unveil an influential urban regeneration project planned for the heart of Venezia Mestre. Envisioned by British-Berlin practice Sauerbruch Hutton, the competition-winning design will be a new “multifaceted and encyclopedic” cultural center of “international appeal” that showcases the “fundamental” 100 years that “revolutionized the world."

True to the country’s experimental past, Russia’s participation for the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale will expose the continued relevance of historical urban ideas by applying them as solutions for contemporary needs. Titled Fair Enough, the exhibition will be presented as an international trade show of ideas, a “marketplace of urban invention” that is both “made in Russia and open to the world.”

This year for the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, Portugal will be officially represented by newspaper. This choice in media corresponds to the possibility of framing worldviews by revelling events, culture traits and socio-economic challenges of a country.

Minsuk Cho of MASS Studies, commissioner and curator of the Korean Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, has announced that he will be responding to director Rem Koolhaas’ theme Absorbing Modernity: 1914-2014 with an exhibition focused on the architecture of divided Korea. With the exhibition Crow’s Eye View: The Korean Peninsula, Cho will present the architecture of North and South Korea as “an agent - a mechanism for generating alternative narratives that are capable of perceiving both the everyday and the monumental in new ways.”

"Is there a distinguishing feature in European architecture beyond the fact that it is 'Made in Europe'?" This question (and others) will be answered in an exhibition which highlights the archives of the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award. Coinciding with the 2014 Venice Biennale, The European Commission and the Fundació Mies van der Rohe present “Made in Europe.” Showing a unparalleled and unique examination of the development in architecture over the past 25 years, the exhibition will draw on material from Europe's largest collection of documents (more than 2,500 projects and 230 original models) on contemporary architecture.

Delving into the fundamentals of architecture by researching the work of Slovene engineer Herman Potočnik Noordung, the pioneer of space architecture, the Pavilion of Slovenia at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale will explore concepts of “space culturalization.” Curated by the Cultural Centre of European Space Technologies (KSEVT), The Problem of Space Travel - Supre:Architecture will parallel solutions from Science and Technology with the Arts and Humanities as a means of envisioning contemporary options for appropriating space.

This year, as the first continent ever to be represented at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Antarctica will bring together leading international architects and artists to explore present and future models of living in the South Polar region. The exhibition, Antarctopia will feature projects and ideas by participants, such as Hugh Broughton, Juergen Mayer H. and Zaha Hadid.

Videos

"We encounter similarities and difference, but what we encounter more than anything else is how intensely all these seemingly stable elements are evolving in time. Sometimes with acceleration, sometimes with moments of stagnation, but actually they are constantly changing. So what seemed to be a look at the repertoire is actually turning into a look at how nothing is stable." - Rem Koolhaas

The Dutch non-profit Global Arts Affairs Foundation has summoned a diverse group of 100 architects from over 40 countries to participate in the Collateral Event “Time Space Existence” at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale.