The Metropolitan Museum of Art has been collecting architecture and design since 1870, when it was given a Roman sarcophagus. More recent acquisitions include a stairway from the Chicago Stock Exchange Building, by Louis Sullivan, and an entire living room by Frank Lloyd Wright.
The U.S. pavilion (1930) was designed by William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich. The Venice Architecture Biennale is a polyglot affair. Some countries use their pavilions as conventional galleries, displaying photographs of finished buildings. Others create architecture-based installations. A smaller number take an intellectual approach, posing and then answering questions derived from architectural theory or practice. And a very few—and these may be the ones taking the greatest risks—pose questions to which the answers are allowed to emerge, through real-time investigation, over the course of the Biennale’s six-month run. Related links Exhibition Review: Time Space Existence Venice Dispatch:
The second main exhibition in this year's Rem Koolhaas-directed Venice Architecture Biennale is a "scan" of Italian cultural, political, and economic life in a sprawling series of work. The show, titled Monditalia, fills the Corderie in Venice's Arsenale—a long, brick-columned space once used to make rope for the Venetian navy. It includes views of Italian architecture, but it also includes art, film, dance performances, and other programming presented in conjunction with the organizers of Venice's other biennial exhibitions. The goal, according to Koolhaas, is to present a portrait of Italy as a "fundamental" country, a characterization he explains as a
Rem Koolhaas and a team of researchers make a case for architecture’s essentials. The entrance to Elements of Architecture in the main pavilion in Venice’s Giardini. When Rem Koolhaas announced what the theme for the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale would be, he went with a characteristic provocation. Fundamentals would forgo the typical, temperature-taking displays of contemporary architecture and focus on historical exhibitions. The Biennale, which began previews yesterday and opens to the public on Saturday, hinges on two major shows: Monditalia, a long-form survey of Italian culture (more on that in a later post), and Elements of Architecture, a show
Image courtesy Storefront for Art and Architecture The curators of the United States's Pavilion at the 2014 Architecture Biennale in Venice call their project OfficeUS. The curators of the United States Pavilion at the 2014 Architecture Biennale in Venice have very ambitious plans: to transform an exhibition space into an architectural office. Announced last week, the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs selected the team of Ashley Schafer, Ana Miljački, and Eva Franch i Gilabert and their proposal to reinterpret the last 100 years of American building outside our borders in a project called OfficeUS. "We want to
