Man and technology – who serves whom? Latvian pavilion will be opened at the Venice Architecture Biennale

Man and technology – who serves whom? The Latvian pavilion will be opened at the Venice Biennale of ArchitecturePaula Dēvica00:00 / 05:37

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“Now mother nature gives way to mother technology. And technology is becoming a way of life in our homes, workplaces and public places. ” With these words, the advertising roll for the Latvian exposition at the Venice Architecture Biennale begins. It is the largest and most prestigious architectural exhibition in the world. The Biennale will open its doors on Saturday, May 22, but the opening of the Latvian pavilion will take place on Friday – those interested will be able to follow it online.

About this year’s Latvian exposition entitled “It’s not for you! This is for the building, ”says curator Uldis Lukševics:“ Most of the exposition is occupied by a cloud of black pipes, and only one small part is left empty, which has remained in such an architectural form of the building with a gable roof. That is the first feeling. From the outside, the visitor thinks there is a lot, it’s all gloomy and is it really meant for him? Maybe it’s just for the house. But the moment a visitor enters the empty room that is covered with a plank floor, and the plank floor is fitted with microphones that enhance the creaking and feeling of the house when a person enters a house with a plank floor. And at that moment the visitor sees that all those pipes that end in an empty space with lights at the ends, that those lights accompany the visitor in that his movement.

And at that moment, a person realizes that all this big tangle of technology is for that person, it is directed against him. ”

All this time the visitor is accompanied by music created by Gata Winter. Lukševics is an architect at NRJA (No Rules Just Architecture). The office has won the competition for participation in the exhibition twice, the first in 2014. This year the exhibition is dedicated to the complex human relationships with technology. The slogan “It is not for you! It’s for the building “calls for a critical look at situations where smart devices begin to dictate their own arrangements, incomprehensible to the architect, which often alienate people from the space they create. Curator and office architect Elīna Lībiete says: “Now that architectural technologies need to address not only the needs of the individual or one community or city, but also global issues such as global warming, the technologies and architectural solutions that enter our living space must be addressed. may seem incomprehensible to the average architect. This, of course, creates some resistance. And we address this resistance in our exhibition. ”

The aim of artists is, firstly, to remind architects, engineers and technologists that in the 21st century architecture must be human, and secondly, to remind people that technology is only a tool to achieve a goal and that what may seem like a building at first to man.

The pavilion is also accompanied by a book of the same name. It summarizes two opposing views – one is the techno-pessimistic view that comes from the user of the architecture. Elīna Lībiete explains: “He is techno-pessimistic or technosceptic because various nonsense and failures appear in architecture and technical solutions, or they do not work the way they should work.

And the question may arise who then serves – a man of technology or a man of technology.

The second part of the book is the explanations of experts who try to explain these strange situations or technical nonsense. “

The Latvian delegation arrived in Venice on May 9, together with the exhibition construction team, who completed the construction work in the middle of this week. In general, this year the pavilion is complicated, explains the project manager Austra Bērziņa. It has an extensive multimedia involvement, as well as the very structure of the exposition and engineering solutions have required a great deal of precision on the part of the staff.

“Latvia’s participation in the Architecture Biennale is also part of Latvia’s cultural policy.

And it is a very important part of cultural policy – both participation in the Venice Art Day and the Architecture Biennale. And what Latvia gets the most is appearing in the international environment. And maybe after the good success of this exhibition we will become an architectural superpower. That, of course, is a joke. But it is a very important section that we participate in all world processes, ”emphasizes Bērziņa.

Latvia participated in this exhibition for the first time in 2002. It takes place every two years and will be available to the general public online this year from 22 May.

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