XIV VENICE ARCHITECTURE BIENNALE: WALL

Conceived as a three-dimensional version of the concurrently-published first edition of Elements, the exhibition takes over the entire Central Pavilion of the Giardini, dedicating an entire room to its own element of architecture. This room continues the thesis of the Wall chapter of Elements, highlighting this element’s transformation from one of stability into instability. The gallery is stripped of the artifice of its existing finishes, revealing remnants of the configurations it has witnessed over the previous generations of Biennales: sealed door openings, scars of previous alterations, conduits, and duct runs.

A dense array of generic walls in the central volume of the gallery displaces visitors to the space once occupied by the room’s false walls, while revealing in section each wall’s hidden complexity in a gradient from solid to lightweight, and from low- to high-technology, ending in a kinetic wall designed by Barkow Leibinger. On the floor of the room, painted lines trace the evolution of the room’s previous configurations over past exhibitions, with each subsequent partitioning of the room overlaid in a different color, revealing the history of walls in this space.

With AMO/OMA and Harvard Graduate School of Design

Exhibited 7 June - 23 November 2014

Venice Architecture Biennale / Padiglione Centrale