The Nordic pavilion, designed by Sverre Fehn in 1962, celebrates nature’s different phenomena: light, sound, materials bringing them together to form a unique architectural experience. The 2018 installation in the Nordic pavilion will build on the context created by Fehn and ask how we see ourselves in relation to nature today. The project is still in development, but aims to create an immersive experience for visitors and a place for meetings and dialogues throughout the biennale.
The project is commissioned jointly by the directors of three museums: Juulia Kauste from the Museum of Finnish Architecture, who is taking the lead this year; Nina Berre from the Norwegian National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design and Kieran Long from ArkDes, the Swedish National Centre for Architecture and Design.
"With today’s mounting environmental challenges, we have the responsibility to restore the balance between the built and natural environment," said Eero Lundén, and adds "Architecture as our most fundamental technology needs to be reinvented and, as architects, we must consider who or what we are building for. What is the worldview behind the buildings we create?”
Background and commissioners’ approach
The International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice biennale is the largest and most important exhibition of architecture in the world. The Nordic pavilion (designed by Sverre Fehn, completed 1962) was built in the biennale gardens as a place where art, and later architecture, from Norway, Sweden and Finland could be displayed at the biennale.Eero Lundén’s 2018 project will be the first of a reenergised collaboration between the directors of the three museums who are co-commissioners of the pavilion.
The biennale has transformed in recent years, moving away from exhibitions representing individual buildings or architects’ bodies of work, towards an engagement with the social, political, environmental and economic forces shaping cities across the world. This can be seen as a generational shift, away from ’starchitects’ and towards a politically engaged, technologically literate and collaborative architectural culture.
The three museums have the ambition to make the Nordic Pavilion a platform for compelling research, creativity and polemic in the field of architecture. We also want visitors to the pavilion to experience the most exciting ideas about architecture emerging from the Nordic region. From this year on, each institution will in turn select a single practitioner or team to drive the content of the pavilion. Those could be architects, researchers, curators or others with a special contribution to architectural culture. The three commissioners will support the development of the projects, but will allow the participants to advance their own arguments freely, without curatorial filters.
The Nordic Pavilion is a unique collaboration between three great museums, and we are deepening that collaboration in 2018. Over a six-year period, the focus of the Nordic Pavilion will shift from Finland, to Norway, to Sweden, to ensure equal representation of the countries. But the aim of the commissioners is to support the best practitioners to make the best possible work.
All three museums will collaborate every year in helping to fund the project, providing curatorial support, and ensuring the Nordic context is part of the participants’ work. This year, the museums will also host research seminars with Eero Lundén’s team in Helsinki, Stockholm and Oslo to that end.
We believe the clarity of this new approach will help practitioners like Eero realise projects in the pavilion that the whole Nordic region can be proud of and that will be memorable for visitors.
