Plenum. Places of Power

The Austrian contribution to the 2014 Biennale is devoted to the parliament and displays two hundred national parliament buildings from around the world.

The Austrian contribution for the 14. International Architecture Exhibition in Venice was introduced in a press conference by commissioner Christian Kühn in the Austrian parlament.

The subject of the Austrian contribution to the 2014 Biennale is parliament, i.e. the place where the power of the people has found its home.

The exhibition at the Austrian Pavilion sets out to find answers to these questions from various vantage points. The main room of the pavilion displays all two hundred national parliament buildings from around the world – a parliament of parliaments – each documented by models on a scale of 1:500, site plans, and facts and figures about the various buildings.

In contrast to these abstract monumental architectures reduced to form, architecture is presented in the two side-rooms of the pavilion not as an accumulation of objects, but as a sequence of conditions. Here we see examples presented in detail: the Austrian parliament on Vienna’s Ringstraße and two projects by Coop Himmelb(l)au, the design for the Albanian parliament in Tirana and the conference centre in Dalian/China, built as a venue for the Asian version of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The exhibition continues to explore this topic in the pavilion’s courtyard. A densely-planted garden planned by the landscape architects Auböck und Kárász replaces the rationalist square grid of the floor panels, bringing the disordered green of the surroundings into the show. Here, away from all monumental architecture, the focus is on new phenomena of democratic representation. Transported by a volatile medium, a sound installation was developed by the Kollektiv / Rauschen group: the garden speaks through small loudspeakers, in quiet separate voices, but also in the swelling chorus of the impatient crowd.