14th Venice ArchitectureBiennale FundamentalsArchDaily Exclusive Coverage

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Responding to Rem Koolhas’s theme of “Absorbing Modernity," OfficeUS, the US's National Pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale, launched as an experimental architecture firm with a mission to revisit, rethink and re-evaluate one thousand American architectural projects from the last century. The Giardini Pavilion was transformed by New-York based firm Leong Leong into a multi-functioning and interdisciplinary office, run by the six “partners" who were hand-picked for the job. Assigned with the ongoing task of producing models, drawings, and engaging in workshops and lectures throughout the duration of the Biennale, the partners and their collaborators in Venice and around the world attempt "to construct an agenda for the future production of architecture."

“Architects make architecture; Phyllis Lambert made architects,” Rem Koolhaas said of his decision to award Phyllis Lambert with this year’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale. In an interview published on iconeye.com, the website for Icon Magazine, the 87-year-old founding director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) discusses her career, Mies van der Rohe, and the state of contemporary architecture with the editor of Icon, Christopher Turner. Read on to learn about her influential life in architecture.

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In this video from our friends at Spirit of Space, Daniel Libeskind talks about his installation for the Venice Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale, entitled 'Sonnets in Babylon'. The installation deals with drawing, an act that Libeskind believes is "the foundational art, and the mystery and the magic of all buildings and cities." To Libeskind, drawings are akin to religious materials, communicating meaning without the use of a fixed language and each with its own power to shape the way we understand the world around us. At the end he gives a hint as to why he is so attached to drawings: "I drew for many years before I even built a building. But I based those buildings that I built on the drawings I made... Every drawing is also a tool for the future."

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Last year I saw Beatriz Colomina present Radical Pedagogies, a research project that she led together with PhD students at Princeton University School of Architecture. Radical Pedagogies focuses on schools and programs from around the world that emerged postwar, strongly tied to social changes of the time. The material produced over three years of seminars, interviews and archive digging shows a compelling story of the ways that "architectural pedagogy" have impacted today's architecture education.

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As part of "Time Space Existence" at the Venice Biennale -- the exhibition which has brought over 100 architects, including Norman Foster, Eduardo Souto de Moura, and Ricardo Bofill, together -- the young Spanish architect, Alejandro Beautell, presents the installation: "about architecture_without capital letters."

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For CNN's George Webster, this year's Biennale is a "bold reminder that architecture is - or at least should be - about a great deal more than blueprints, digital renderings and scale models." Taking the British Pavilion as a case in point, Webster argues that Koolhaas' original thematic provocation has paid off, succeeding "because it places people - our history, culture and even our bodies - at the very heart of its thinking." Travelling through the pavilions of Romania, Germany, the Dominican Republic, and Russia, you can read the article in full here.

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"Chinese architects account for 1% of the world total, but the turnover from building work is 1/10 of the world total. In other words, one hundredth of the world’s architects must design 33% of all buildings and they must do this for just 1/10 of the profit. How does this condition effect architecture?"

From the Curators. By making space the manifestation of content and content an insight of the space, space and content are correlated in the China Pavilion in that content provides an explicit timeline of China’s 100 years’ of architectural thinking (dual theme threads), while space presents an implicit theme of Yi Xiang (imagery-scape) through the history of Chinese architecture.

"Poi piovve dentro a l'alta fantasmi." ("Then rained down within the high fantasy...") Dante Alighieri (Purgatorio XVII.25)

Norwegian architect and Pritzker Laureate Sverre Fehn’s original drawings for the Nordic Pavilion in Venice are to be presented alongside Ferruzzi’s monochromatic photographs of the building in an exhibition at the National Museum of Architecture in Oslo. Venice: Fehn’s Nordic Pavilion documents the incredible task undertaken by Fehn who, at the age of thirty-four, won the competition to design the pavilion and subsequently won international acclaim when the building was completed in 1962.

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Among the Venice Biennale's two-pronged approach of hype and glamour on one hand, and artistry and theory on the other, it's easy to forget that the event is one of the biggest gatherings of architects around - and as such represents a great opportunity to put the more prosaic concerns of the profession out in the open.

Under the direction of Laboratorio de Arquitectura Dominicana (LAD), the Dominican Republic's first Pavilion at the Venice Biennale explored the intersection of architecture, urbanism, and politics through the lens of the Feria de la Paz y Confraternidad del Mundo Libre (The Fair of Peace and Brotherhood of the Free World), celebrated in 1955 in Santo Domingo. The fair was an attempt by the dictator Rafael Trujillo to project to the outside world a vision of a modern country firmly under his dictatorial control.

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One of the 100 architects and offices taking part in the "Time Space Existence" exhibition, running parallel to the Venice Biennale, Studio MK27's Marcio Kogan has contributed to the exhibition with five videos that, often comedically and/or dramatically, portray the daily lives of the residents of his works.

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UPDATE: We've added our interview with Jimenez Lai.

Jimenez Lai, leader of Bureau Spectacular and curator of Taiwan's Pavilion for the 2014 Venice Biennale, claims that "domesticity is possibly one of the origins of architecture" and that "the standardization of the domestic program was...a very modern development." Thus, Lai built nine single-program houses within the Palazzo della Prigioni, each dedicated to one specific domestic act--such as sleeping, eating, etc. The result is a vibrant, colorful response to Rem Koolhaas' unifying theme: "Absorbing Modernity."

From the Curators. The exhibition at the Nordic Pavilion has been titled FORMS OF FREEDOM: African Independence and Nordic Models. The exhibition explores and documents how modern Nordic architecture was an integral part of Nordic aid to East Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. The resulting architecture is of a scope and quality that has not previously been comprehensively studied or exhibited.

"We often invent the future with elements from the past."