Bahrain | 14th Venice Architecture Biennale

Fundamentalists and other Arab Modernisms
Exhibition of the Kingdom of Bahrain

The pavilion of the Kingdom of Bahrain at the Biennale presents a survey of the modern architectural models imposed on the Arab world by European colonialism. From the Algiers master plan to the Soviet Union’s 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.
The pavilion, designed by Bernard Khoury /DW5, is particularly worth a mention for its captivating and iconic design.

Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014
Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014 is an invitation to the national pavilions to show, each in their own way, the process of the erasure of national characteristics in architecture in favor of the almost universal adoption of a single modern language and a single repertoire of typologies – a more complex process than we typically recognize, involving significant encounters between cultures, technical inventions, and hidden ways of remaining “national”.