The 11th International Architecture Exhibition entitled Out There: Architecture Beyond Building, directed by Aaron Betsky and organized by La Biennale di Venezia presided over by Paolo Baratta, will take place in Venice from Sunday, September 14th to Sunday, November 23rd 2008.
According to Aaron Betsky, six year director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) in Rotterdam, and director of the Cincinnati Art Museum 11th Architecture Biennale Out There: Architecture Beyond Building, “will point the way towards an architecture liberated from buildings to engage the central issues of our society; instead of the tombs of architecture, which is to say buildings, it will present site specific installations, visions and experiments that help us figure out, make sense of and feel at home in our modern world.”
Betsky goes on to point out “what should be an obvious fact: architecture is not building. Buildings are objects and the act of building leads to such objects, but architecture is something else. It is the way we think and talk about buildings, how we represent them, how we build them. This is architecture. More generally, architecture is a way of representing, shaping and perhaps even offering critical alternatives to the human-made environment. In fact, buildings are not enough. They are the tombs of architecture, the residue of the desire to make another world, a better world, and a world open to possibilities beyond the everyday. In a concrete sense, architecture is that which allows us to be at home in the world”.
“The challenge of the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale – underlines Betsky - 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. This Biennale 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”
