14th International Architecture Exhibition/ Fundamentals

Two weeks after it was announced that Rem Koolhaas will direct the 2014 Venice Biennale, he revealed the title for the exhibition: Fundamentals. In a statement he said, "Fundamentals will be a Biennale about architecture, not architects. After several Biennales dedicated to the celebration of the contemporary, Fundamentals will focus on histories – on the inevitable elements of all architecture used by any architect, anywhere, anytime ... and on the evolution of national architectures in the last 100 years."

Koolhaas is taking aim at the loss of national identities in the modern era. He further explains, "Having the decisive advantage of starting work a year earlier than the Biennale’s typical schedule, we hope to use this extra time to introduce a degree of coordination and coherence among the National Pavilions. Ideally, we would want the represented countries to engage a single theme – Absorbing Modernity: 1914-2014 – and to show, each in their own way, the process of the erasure of national characteristics in favour of the almost universal adoption of a single modern language in a single repertoire of typologies."

The additional time stems from the decision to turn the exhibition into a research project (where Koolhaas famously excels) and to better integrate the participating countries into the process, so the whole exhibition is more thematically coherent. Other changes include a longer schedule following the earlier start date (June 7), and more workshops and seminars to "enrich it as an active-exhibition."