Japan | 14th Venice Architecture Biennale

In the real world
Japan pavilion | 14th Architecture Biennale

In Japan, modernization coincided with the import of the Western Model after World War Two, but the Country’s frantic development process, in which architecture played a fundamental role, also produced contradictions and criticalities that, in the early 1970s, added themselves to the Energy crisis.
“In the real world” is focused on the works of a Japanese generation of architects that, during the Seventies, were rethinking the mission of architects as well as experimenting with new design methods, mainly on small buildings, aimed to create and alternative model for Japanese cities.
The exhibition presents the vision of those architects and also in its design is inspired by them.

 Photos by Inexhibit

The space on the ground floor of the pavilion features the film Inside Architecture – a challenge to Japanese Society, with interviews with Tadao Ando, Arata Isozaki, Toyo Ito, Charles Jancks, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, and Toshio Nakamura.

photo by Bruno Cordioli

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”.