Pavilions | 14th Architecture Biennale

Place: Venice, Italy
La Biennale di Venezia

Absorbing Modernity, 1914-2014
National Pavilions
14th Venice Architecture Biennale
Curator: Rem Koolhaas

Text by Federica Lusiardi, Inexhibit
Photos by Riccardo Bianchini, Inexhibit

14th Venice Architecture Biennale | National pavilions

Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014 is the exhibition focused on the theme proposed by Rem Koolhaas and developed by the curators of the national pavilions: what modernity meant for each of the 66 countries participating in Fundamentals, the 14th edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale?

Did modernity uniform architecture? Have cultural identities been flattened and sacrificed on its altar? How modernity has been, over time, metabolized in different countries?

Despite its title, Absorbing Modernity1914-2014 does not declare the global triumph of modernity, it asked instead the pavilion curators to give a tailored interpretation of its significance by looking at the recent history of the respective countries.

Every Nation participating at the Biennale, which by starting from different social and political contexts has faced a specific modernization process, provided its reply, underlying its own peculiarities and narrating a history made, depending on the case, of successes, failures, hopes, and contradictions.

The result is a mosaic that depicts how, beyond the apparently cultural uniformity of supposed globalization, the peculiar history of every nation mingled with modernity, producing a varied set of different outcomes.

Here we present a selection of 26 National pavilions.

See our article for each pavilion by clicking on the icons below.

AUSTRIA