Venice Architecture Biennale Pavilion 2008, Arsenale Exhibition, Aaron Betsky, Architect

Venice Biennale Arsenale Installation

Italian Biennale 2008 Installation – Venetian Architecture design by UNStudio, Architects, NL

15 Sep 2008

Venice Biennale Arsenale Installation 2008

UNStudio presents ‘The Changing Room’

Venetian architectural installation at the 11th Venice Biennale of Architecture 2008

For this year’s international architecture biennale in Venice UNStudio has produced ‘The Changing Room’ as part of the exhibition ‘out there: architecture beyond building’ curated by Aaron Betsky.

The UNStudio installation in the Arsenale explores the transformative potential of the material world. Just like clothes designers, architects offer alternate looks and identities, age and income-appropriate shells.

These constructions consist of a miscellaneous package of endogenous and exogenous values; things and ideas that inherently belong to architecture and its traditions, and things and ideas that do not, but that nevertheless profoundly influence architecture. How to deal with this? Can architecture still have autonomy? According to UNStudio the lesson is to ‘switch it on, switch it off’… to find autonomy in brief moments of liberation.

The installation structure shows an architecture that is as supple as textile, in which floors, walls and ceilings flow into each other. On the inside, the visitor encounters a kaleidoscopic world of people posing, inviting voyeurism, and seeking transformation in their own conceptualizations of the changing room.

image © MESO

“Today, architecture is determined too much by the values surrounding it. Can architecture be denuded of these values, and, if so, what then does this stripped architecture embody? What we must do is switch those values on and off! Even in one project. Like art.”

Ben van Berkel & Caroline Bos

Venice Biennale of Architecture 2008 The Changing Room text from UN Studio 050908

UNStudio

Location: Venice, Italy, southern Europe