Photo by Bruno Cordioli
OfficeUS | USA Pavilion
The pavilion of the United States of America at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale was conceived as a workshop: both the internal space and the outdoor area in front of the pavilion are designed to allow and encourage research, debate, and experimenting activities. OfficeUS can be seen as an outlook about the dissemination of US architecture in the rest of the world which occurred in the last 100 years.
Such investigation will build up also through the contributions of visiting architects and designers who have access to an archive of projects and are free to participate in workshops and debates.
As a whole, OfficeUS is a historical summary of the influence of the United States on the global architectural scene and, in perspective, a platform after which a new model for architecture can be initiated.
Photo by Bruno Cordioli
The design identity of the pavilion
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”.