Re-creation
Pavilion of Finland
Re-creation, the installation presented by Finland at the Venice Architecture Biennale was conceived on the occasion of the Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture ( 全球唯一“城市建筑”双年展 ), as a part of Value Factory, a project that converted a disused industrial site in a creative factory.
The installation presents two huts, one made in Finland with local timber and one in bamboo realized in China by local specialists. Re-creation – along with focusing on the idea of shelter, the archetype form of all buildings – also investigates the dualism between original and copy as well as that between national identity and globalization. The physical realization of the installation and of its huts would have made no sense without a strict collaboration between Finland and China; thus a traditional construction becomes a veritable declaration of modernity.
Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014
Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014 is an invitation to the national pavilions to show, each in their own way, the process of the erasure of national characteristics in architecture in favor of the almost universal adoption of a single modern language and a single repertoire of typologies – a more complex process than we typically recognize, involving significant encounters between cultures, technical inventions, and hidden ways of remaining “national”.