officeUS

OfficeUS, the U.S. Presentation at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition — la Biennale di Venezia, explores the last 100 years of United States architectural production abroad and the ways in which the U.S. architecture office has exported architecture around the globe. Curators Eva Franch i Gilabert, Ana Miljački and Ashley Schafer re-imagine the U.S. Pavilion as an active, global, experimental architecture office that researches, studies, and remakes projects from an onsite archive of 1,000 buildings and the 200 U.S. based architecture offices engaged in their construction. Collectively, the projects in the archive tell multiple, imbricated stories of U.S. firms, typologies, and technologies. The office consists of 8 architects selected from an international open call, visiting experts, and outpost offices distributed worldwide. Over the 25 weeks of the Biennale, OfficeUS will revisit the projects in the archive, their premises and conclusions, to construct an agenda for the future production of architecture. Collectively designed by New York based architects Leong Leong, graphic designer Natasha Jen/Pentagram and technology consultants at CASE, OfficeUS dwells on fundamental aspects of historical office corporate identity and design. The design features a wall of project binders housing architectural documentation of each project and disrupts the classical floorplan of the pavilion through a large, collective work-space that moves through each room — inverting interior and exterior — presenting a depth to collect and display historical materials and work produced by the partners working in the office. OfficeUS looks simultaneously backward and forward, rethinking both historical material and office protocols from the archive, while using the U.S. pavilion-based office, OfficeUS, to develop new work and as a portal to host discussions and workshops. “Taking history as its foundational ground, we envision OfficeUS not just as an exhibition, but as the first headquarters for a new model of global architectural production. In these ways, OfficeUS is an anti-exhibition, it turns the pavilion from presentation to demonstration. We are setting a stage for the architects and visitors to address and respond to the most pressing architectural anxieties of the last one hundred years,” say curators Franch i Gilabert, Miljački and Schafer. OfficeUS is commissioned by Storefront for Art and Architecture, on behalf of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The project is developed in collaboration with PRAXIS journal and with students from MIT’s Department of Architecture and the Knowlton School at The Ohio State University. Partner Lars Müller is publishing four catalogs about the exhibition and media partner Architizer is host to a series of online articles exploring the many layers of OfficeUS.