Austria | 14th Venice Architecture Biennale

The Austrian pavilion, designed in 1934 by Joseph Hoffman

Plenum: Places of power

Pavilion of Austria | 14th Architecture Biennale of Venice

The exhibition featured at the pavilion of Austria at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2014 is focused on the architecture of Parliament houses, the key places of political debating. Their form, almost unchanged during the last two centuries, is with few exceptions inspired by that of the ancient Greece theater. The exhibition depicts the parliament houses from different points of view: 1:500 scale models, arranged on the perimeter walls, illustrate all parliament building typologies of the 19th and 20th centuries; at the same time two detailed case studies are detailed, the Austrian parliament house in Vienna and the new Albanian parliament building in Tirana, currently under construction.
The pavilion courtyard, set up like a garden, is conceived as a space for the representation of contemporary democracy; thus the “chirping” sounds, diffused by speakers installed on top of trees, are actually real “tweets” by members of the European Union parliament as well as by people protesting in the streets, digitally converted into vocal messages.