And the director is ... Rem Koolhaas!

The rumors have been around for a while, but only today it has been made official: Rem Koolhaas will be the director of the 14th International Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2014. After the meeting of the board of directors today, president Paolo Baratta stated: “The Architecture Exhibitions of the Biennale have gradually grown in importance internationally. Rem Koolhaas, one of the most significant personalities among the architects of our time – who has based all his work on intense research, now renowned celebrity – has accepted to engage himself in yet another research and, why not, rethinking.” – whatever that quite means. In his own statement, Rem Koolhaas has (of course) not given away anything about his concept for 2014, which will now be developed. He kept his statement very general: “We want to take a fresh look at the fundamental elements of architecture – used by any architect, anywhere, anytime – to see if we can discover something new about architecture.”

However, we can expect a lot from Koolhaas. At least an exhibition that deals with architecture (and the societies that build it) more critically and profoundly than at recent biennales, which focussed pretty much on architecture as the art of building (see uncube magazine no. 02: “Venice & the Common Ground”). And perhaps even some fresh ideas on how architecture/building can be represented in an exhibition. At least we know one thing already: It will be a unusually long Biennale, opening on June 7th, 2014, and running until November 23rd. Instead of the usual three-month-period this will be almost five months. And we wouldn't be overly surprised if he even decided to show nothing at all, but just gathered some of today's most prolific thinkers together in the Arsenale, to sit them down to engage in a five month-long discussion.

www.labiennale.org