Rem Koolhaas blows the ceiling off the Venice Architecture Biennale
Through the roof … the ‘ceiling’ room in the central pavilion – part of Rem Koolhaas’s Fundamentals at the Venice Architecture Biennale. // Photo: David Levene/the Guardian
A shiny tangle of pumps and pipes spills out above a suspended polystyrene ceiling in the central pavilion of the Venice Biennale, the metallic guts of air conditioning and sprinkler systems sliced open for all to see. Above this cross-section of a contemporary office ceiling, which hovers claustrophobically close to your head, soars a majestic dome, frescoed with heroic scenes of the evolution of art.
“The ceiling used to be decorative, a symbolic plane, a place invested with intense iconography,” says Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch director of this year’s architecture extravaganza, standing beneath his exploded ceiling. “Now, it has become an entire factory of equipment that enables us to exist, a space so deep that it begins to compete with the architecture. It is a domain over which architects have lost all control, a zone surrendered to other professions.”
Such is the message of Fundamentals, an exhibition that describes the evolution of architecture through its “essential elements” – from the door and floor to window and wall – and with it, the progressive eradication of the discipline of architecture itself. It is a story of mutation from things that were once heavy and hefty, thick with the meaning of their making, to a world of skins and screens, flimsy surfaces made “smart” with the slippery magic of technology.