Biennale Architettura 2021
How will we live together?

Modernity

2014 Modernity – Loved, hated or ignored?

The exhibition “Modernity – loved, hated or ignored?” How has modernity come to dominate everyday experience? How do we view the buildings that we pass every day? Do we reject them or embrace them? Or are we merely indifferent to them? Like special agent Dale Cooper arriving in unknown territory in the small border town of Twin Peaks in the famous TV series by David Lynch, Jane Doe arrives in Luxembourg, where five investigations await her. Each investigation has the same goal, that of retracing the meandering path followed by human beings in their insatiable quest for modernity. This journey through space and time is an encounter with progress and resistance, openness and withdrawal. In contrast with contemporary amnesia, the goal is to resurrect events that formed the memory of a place by means of press reports, personal accounts and documents retrieved from archives. The pieces of evidence gathered in the course of the investigation combine to form parallel stories which are ultimately combined to form a huge puzzle.

The 14th Venice Architecture Biennale “Fundamentals” The exhibition “Modernity – loved, hated or ignored?” perfectly responds to the general theme of the 14th Biennale edition, directed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and entitled “Fundamentals”. His aim was to create a real research-exhibition. Thus, to encourage coherence between the contributions of the national pavilions, Koolhaas introduced the specific, common topic of “Absorbing Modernity – 1914-2014”. Each country was invited to study its’ last hundred years of architecture by choosing its’ own accents and defining its’ own original approach to the subject. The result of this is a collective story telling about the impact of “modernity”, supposed to help understanding the current situation.

Exhibition          Investigations          Curators          Press