“La Biennale di Venezia” is the world’s most important cultural festival incorporating major international exhibitions on art, film, music, theatre and architecture. The architecture festival attracts a global audience of professionals, critics and the public to visit and discuss the exhibitions. The Albanian Pavilion exhibition represents an important opportunity to reflect on Albanian contemporary architecture and is a means to contribute to promotion and international distribution of its values.
The 16th International Architecture Exhibition will be inaugurated on Saturday, May 26 and will conclude on Sunday, November 25, 2018. The two days of vernissage are to be hold on May 24 and 25, 2018. The exhibition will have a spatial, physical presence of a scale and quality, which will impact on the visitor, communicating architecture’s complex spatial nature. The exhibition invites emotional and intellectual engagement of the many who come to the Biennale in order to understand architecture more fully, to stimulate discussion on core architectural values and to celebrate architecture’s proven and enduring contribution to humanity. The 16th International Architecture Exhibition will also present the National Participations with their own exhibitions in the Pavilions at the Giardini and at the Arsenale, and in the historic city centre of Venice. This edition will also include selected Collateral Events, presented by international institutions, which will present their exhibitions and initiatives in Venice concurrently with the 16th Exhibition.
Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara are the architect’s curators of The 16th International Architecture Exhibition – “La Biennale di Venezia”. With the theme of Freespace, the “Biennale Architettura 2018” will present for public scrutiny examples, proposals, elements – built or unbuilt – of work that exemplifies essential qualities of architecture which include the modulation, richness and materiality of surface; the orchestration and sequencing of movement, revealing the embodied power and beauty of architecture. “Freespace describes a generosity of spirit and a sense of humanity at the core of architecture’s agenda, focusing on the quality of space itself. It focuses on architecture’s ability to provide free and additional spatial gifts to those who use it and on its ability to address the unspoken wishes of strangers. Freespace celebrates architecture’s capacity to find additional and unexpected generosity in each project – even within the most private, defensive, exclusive or commercially restricted conditions. It provides the opportunity to emphasise nature’s free gifts of light – sunlight and moonlight, air, gravity, materials – natural and man-made resources. Freespace encourages reviewing ways of thinking, new ways of seeing the world, of inventing solutions where architecture provides for the well-being and dignity of each citizen of this fragile planet. Freespace can be a space for opportunity, a democratic space, un-programmed and free for uses not yet conceived. There is an exchange between people and buildings that happens, even if not intended or designed, so buildings themselves find ways of sharing and engaging with people over time, long after the architect has left the scene”.
The Team that has been carefully put together, has a strong common denominator in its critical approach to designing, one that searches for stimuli not only in the visual world, but also drawing inspiration from the social fabric, humanity, history and the local culture as a whole. The process aimed at freeing itself of all social, political or architectural complexes and just viewing the daily exchange between people and architecture in all its cultural layers as vibrant energy shaping a rich social life in contemporary Tirana.