South Korea received the Golden Lion for the best national pavilion: in its exposition the "absorption of modernity", which the curator of the Biennale Rem Koolhaas commissioned to display to the participating countries, is presented on the material of both parts of the Korean Peninsula, although they are separated by the state border. The jury highlighted the depth of the resulting exploration given the ever-tense political environment and difficult relations between South and North Korea.
However, this decision could have been predicted: at a press conference timed to coincide with the opening of the Biennale, Koolhaas highlighted the pavilions of Korea, Japan and China as particularly interesting: they reflect the difficult political situation within these countries and their relations with neighbors.
The Chilean Pavilion dedicated to large-panel housing construction received the Silver Lion. In 1972, the panel-making plant KPD (also called KPD in Latin) was donated by the USSR to President Salvador Allende to help him build socialism in Chile faster. Since then, the regimes have changed, but in the country they managed to build 153 residential complexes from the panels of this plant. All in all, in the world in the second half of the last century, 170 million apartments were built by this method, but this huge array has been very little studied and often drops out of the history of architecture altogether.
Curators correct this injustice by placing in the center of the exposition a "catalog" of 28 types of panel systems that appeared and spread around the world from 1931 to 1981. As expected, about half of them are Soviet. However, they approach panel housing construction quite critically and are in no hurry to sing his praises.
Three special prizes were also awarded: Canada - for an exhibition on innovative construction in the Arctic Circle, in the Nunavut region.
France - for the exposition of Jean-Louis Cohen "Modernity: A Promise or a Threat?", That the utopian plans to provide all citizens with quality housing by Jean Prouvé and Raymond Camus came true not at all as their authors expected.
Also - as in 2012 - the Russian pavilion with the exhibition Fair Enough: Russia's past our Present (Commissioner - Semyon Mikhailovsky, curator - Strelka Institute represented by Anton Kalgaev, Daria Paramonova and Brendan McGetrick) received a special prize for “presenting the modern language of commercialization architecture . About the concept of the domestic exposition
can be read here, and soon Archi.ru will publish a detailed story about the project implemented in the pavilion.
Awards for participation in the main exposition of the biennale were handed out only to numerous curators of Monditalia (for each “site” there was a team responsible for it), since its second part - “Elements of Architecture” - was created by Koolhaas himself, albeit in co-authorship. The Silver Lion was awarded to Andres Jacques and the Office for Political Innovation for reflecting the influence of the media on contemporary Italian urban planning.
And, as we reported earlier, at the suggestion of Rem Koolhaas, Phyllis Lambert, the customer of the Seagram Building and the founder of the Canadian Center for Architecture, was awarded the Golden Lion for his contribution to the development of architecture.
