According to his idea, the 2014 Biennale will be “about architecture, not about architects” and will also focus on “history - unchanging elements of architecture used by any architect, anywhere, anytime (door, floor, ceiling, etc.) and on the evolution of national “architectures” in the last 100 years”, in contrast to previous Venice Biennials, where the focus was on modernity.
Koolhaas believes that in 1914 [the year of the outbreak of the 1st World War and the starting point of modern times] one could "speak of" Chinese "," Swiss "or" Indian "architecture. A century later, under the influence of wars, various political regimes, national and international architectural movements, individual gifts, friendships, random [life] paths of individuals and the development of technology, "architecture" that was once peculiar and local, became interchangeable and global … National identity seems to have been sacrificed for modernity."
Therefore, the curator wants to make Absorbing Modernity: 1914-2014 (“all-consuming modernity” or “absorption of modernity”) the theme of the future Biennale. Moreover, he wants to take advantage of the relatively early start of his work (he was appointed a year and a half before the start of the exhibition, and his predecessors were given work for less than a year) and coordinate all national expositions with this topic. Ideally, the participating countries (there will be 40 in 2014) should show, each by its own example, “the process of blurring national lines in favor of the almost universal acceptance of a single modern language with a single typological repertoire.”
At the same time, Koolhaas is not inclined to simplify this process, which includes the meeting of different cultures, technical innovations and the preservation of often elusive national features, since in the current era of increasing globalization it is very important to restore and present these plots (narratives). The aim of this “exploratory” biennale, among other things, will be to discover the surviving “unique national traits and mentalities that continue to exist and flourish even as international cooperation and exchange intensifies.”
For his part, the president of the Biennale Foundation Paolo Baratta explained that the reason for such an expanded program of the future exhibition is the crisis of modern architecture. Customers demand from architects more and more spectacular and unusual projects, while society is losing the ability to formulate its own requirements for them, and the sphere of "ordinary" architecture is becoming more commonplace, if not squalid.
Baratta also stressed that Koolhaas's research approach is a natural stage in the development of the architectural biennale, which originated as an "imitation" of an art exhibition and moves towards greater depth - through educational programs, round tables, conferences and publications that accompany the biennial in recent years. This turn is also associated with its longer duration, for the first time equal to the artistic one: June 7 - November 23, 2014 (the opening day is scheduled for June 5-6, 2014).
