VENICE.- La Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Paolo Baratta, inaugurates the 11th International Architecture Exhibition titled Out There: Architecture Beyond Building, and directed by Aaron Betsky. The Exhibition will take place from Sunday September 14th through Sunday November 23rd 2008.

According to Aaron Betsky – for six years director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) in Rotterdam, one of the most prestigious museums and architecture centres in the world, and Director of the Cincinnati Art Museum since last year – the 11th Architecture Exhibition turns to architecture beyond building to address the central issues of our society. Instead of buildings, it will present installations made by architects who have responded to the impulse offered by Betsky and accepted his challenge. This challenge reverberates onto us, encourages our capacity for interpretation, and relies on emotion to give us the chance to make sense of the world and feel at home in it. Betsky points out “what should be an obvious fact: architecture is not building. Architecture must go beyond buildings because buildings are not enough. They are big and wasteful accumulations of natural resources that are difficult to adapt to the continually changing conditions of modern life”.

“Most buildings are ugly, useless and wasteful. Yet architecture is beautiful – says Betsky – it can place us in the world in a way no other art can. It can make us at home in modern reality. It offers and shapes that most precious and luxurious of all phenomena in the modern world: space. The exhibition seeks is to collect and encourage experimentation in architecture. Such experimentation can take the form of momentary constructions, visions of other worlds, or the building blocks of a better world. It does not want to present buildings that are already in existence and can be enjoyed in real life. It does not want to propose abstract solutions to social problems, but wants to see if architecture, by experimenting in and on the real world, can offer some concrete forms or seductive images”.

The 11th Architecture Exhibition, Out There: Architecture Beyond Building, will therefore present installations, manifestos and utopian visions in the venues of the Arsenale and the Padiglione Italia at the Giardini. These are experiments developed here to meet the specific goal of the exhibition: to experiment with forms that will renew architecture, the space we live in, our own existence. In the Arsenale visitors will see 23 Installations, and in the Padiglione Italia they will discover the experimental work of 55 international firms and a survey of the Masters of the Experiment.

The Corderie in the Arsenale will open with the presentation of Hall of Fragments, by David Rockwell with Casey Jones + Reed Kroloff: an interactive work that reflects on architecture’s capacity to release its visionary power by borrowing from film imagery. The Corderie will present large-scale Installations, that “are not prototypes for buildings – says Betsky – they are not built affirmations of the purity of form, they are not examples of experiments taking place elsewhere”. They represent different ways of asking questions about architecture and how to feel “at home” in the world. This exhibition raises a challenge that is to be considered within the totality of the works on display, above and beyond the meaning of each individual project. The challenge is to open a dialogue with the audience, not an act of isolation. The architects communicate with the visitors by means of their Manifestos, declarations of intent presented by the authors themselves to involve the visitors in their visions and in their idea of architecture. It aims to establish a common ground and to share a common understanding of things. The participants in the Installations will include : Asymptote, Atelier Bow Wow, Barkow Leibinger Architects, Nigel Coates, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Diller Scofidio+Renfro, Droog Design+Kesselkramer, Vicente Guallart, Frank O. Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Ante Liu, Greg Lynn, M-A-D, Massimiliano Fuksas, MVRDV, Penezić and Rogina, Philippe Rahm, Matthew Ritchie in collaboration with Aranda/Lasch and Daniel Bosia/ARUP AGU, Kramervanderveer, Thonik and UNStudio. The exhibition continues outside the Corderie with a modern-day yurt from Kazakhstan by Totan Kuzembaev, which represents the meeting point between the traditional nomadic civilization and the contemporary one. The visit ends at the Giardino delle Vergini, a new space acquired by La Biennale di Venezia, with Towards Paradise, a landscape installation by Gustafson Porter-Gustafson Guthrie Nichol.

Whereas Out There: Architecture Beyond Building is an invitation by Aaron Betsky to reflect on a dimension of architecture that reaches beyond buildings, the same invitation is addressed to the way we look at the city. It is not fortuitous that the Exhibition continues at the Artiglierie dell’Arsenale with two exhibitions about Rome: Roma Interrotta and Uneternal City. The first is sponsored by the Incontri Internazionali d’Arte and reproposes an innovative project conceived by Piero Sartogo in 1978, in which 12 great international architects were invited to configure a “New Rome”, working on the historic heart of the city (see attachment). The second exhibition is Uneternal City which, thirty years after Roma Interrotta, calls upon twelve architectural firms – from Italy, Europe, the United States and Asia - to verify the general theme underlying the entire exhibition by Aaron Betsky, but applying it to the suburbs of the Capital. How does a contemporary city change, what might be the visions of possible desirable future scenarios? Starting with what it is, in the complex sprawling reality of a territory such as the area surrounding Rome, Uneternal City is a challenge to architecture, not from its traditional historical center, but from the vaster reality of its surrounding territory. Twelve architectural firms were invited to participate: Centola & Associati, Delogu Associati, Giammetta&Giammetta, Labics, n!studio, Nemesi Studio, t-studio, BIG - Bjarke Ingels Group (Denmark), Clark Stevens-New West Land Company (USA), Koning Eizenberg Architecture (USA), MAD Office (China), West 8 Urban Design & Landscape Architecture (The Netherlands).

The Artiglierie will also present the top 10 projects and 40 honourable mentions in the international online competition for university students Everyville 2008. Communities beyond Place, Civic consciousness beyond Architecture curated by Aaron Betsky in collaboration with Francesco Delogu. Everyville 2008 is an initiative made possible by the collaboration between La Biennale di Venezia and Gruppo Telecom Italia, which has offered the highly innovative technology used on the website www.everyville.labiennale.org to support the competition and display the winning projects. The software is powered by newitalianblood.com and MACE. In collaboration with Domus and Foscarini.

At the Giardini, the Padiglione Italia will highlight experimentation. This section is divided into three distinct spheres: Masters of the Experiment represents the influx of the most significant experimental languages in recent decades, Experimental Architecture investigates new ways of making architecture and working on the contemporary urban reality and Upload City offers a virtual look at possible future development using Internet. Experimental Architecture, in collaboration with Emiliano Gandolfi, aims to define new possibilities for intervention, a new way of making architecture and imagining our future. The projects submitted by the 55 firms invited stretch the limits of architectural experimentation, pursuing a common shared imagery. The starting point for the works on display may be found in Masters of the Experiment, a tribute to six architects who have exercised the greatest influence on contemporary experimental architecture: Frank O. Gehry, Herzog & de Meuron, Morphosis, Zaha Hadid and Coop Himmelb(l)au and Rem Koolhaas represented by Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoîne and the drawings of Madelon Vriesendorp. Finally Upload City, with the collaboration of Saskia van Stein, will show videos downloaded from YouTube and from the Web to highlight how different communities absorb contemporary urban imagery and modify its meaning, suggesting unexpected ways to use the city.