2014 International Architecture Biennale

PAYETTE was invited to participate in the U.S. Pavilion at the 2014 International Architecture Biennale in Venice, which opens June 7 and runs through November 23.

The exhibition, directed by Rem Koolhaas, will be composed of pavilions from 65 participating countries. Koolhaas proposed the theme, Absorbing Modernity: 1914-2014:

The US Pavilion will be organized by OfficeUS, which was formed by the Storefront for Art and Architecture and the journal PRAXIS. The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs supports and manages official U.S. participation at the Venice Architecture Biennale, and the selection of OfficeUS resulted from an open competition.

The U.S. Pavilion will be entitled, OfficeUS: Criticism by Re-making. The installation will contain two interrelated components: (1) The Repository: an exhibition archive of 1,000 projects designed in foreign countries by U.S. architecture firms over the past 100 years; (2) The Office: a laboratory of diverse individuals who will critically remake and reinterpret the material in the Repository.

OfficeUS provides an intellectual sandbox to understand the past and future ways in which every architecture office, big and small, corporate and “avant-garde,” contributes to the global architectural unconscious of economic, social and political forms. – OfficeUS

The curators of OfficeUS are:
Eva Franch i Gilabert Executive Director and Chief Curator of Storefront for Art and Architecture
Ana Miljački Assistant Professor of Architecture at MIT
Ashley Schafer Editor of PRAXIS and Associate Professor of Architecture at The Ohio State University

PAYETTE submitted projects to The Repository as well a profile of our studio culture for The Office portion of the exhibition.