The Polish pavilion at the Architecture Biennale in Venice received an honorable mention from the jury in the category of national pavilions. Curator Michał Libera, pavilion’s author Katarzyne Krakowiak,  sound designer Ralf Meinz and acoustic engineer Andrzej Kłosak created an architeture of sound. The seemingly empty space of the pavilion is actually filled with sounds, which also affected the architecture of the pavilion itself.

Michał Libera explains: “Architecture is built of sound. It is what makes the diffusion of sound possible—absorbing, filtering, and transferring it, amplifying some of its components at the expense of others. Enclosed spaces are room tones, while niches are specific echoes. The ventilation and heating systems are a quiet yet constant noise, whereas windows and walls are the filtered sounds of street bustle, the buzzing of cicadas, or neighbor’s living rooms. We live, work and play in gigantic complexes of sounds—their distribution is what we call architecture.”

Katarzyna Krakowiak’s sound sculpture Making the walls quake as if they were dilating with the secret knowledge of great powers is the amplification of the Polish Pavilion as a listening-system. Rather than creating a new space, the artist’s proposal for the Architecture Biennale takes an empirical turn, taking the existing interior as its point of departure, with all its deficiencies and imperfections guiding the work. The art is in the “naked building”—presented through sculpture as a complex sonic process that generates, transforms, and transmits sound.

Studies in the natural acoustics of the Polish Pavilion offer several ways to perform the amplification process. Architectural micro-deformations of the building’s walls and floor, the renovation of the ventilation system, and reinforcement of the resonant frequencies serve to bring this latent acoustic experience to the fore.

None of the sounds in the Pavilion are alien to the building. They are all always already there. Yet, once amplified, the familiar ambient sounds become alien themselves. Beyond the visual and the material, they compel us to hear what was always there—the others just outside the walls. Hence, the real subject of the work is essentially the entire architectural complex that is home to four other pavilions: Egypt, Romania, Serbia, and Venice.

Photo: Miloš Mirosavić, Diana Pereira, © Zacheta

Drawing: © Katarzyna Krakowiak

Russian Pavilion at the 13th edition of Venice Biennale is awarded with a Special Mention, in the category of national pavilions. Exhibition was curated and designed by Sergei Tchoban and Sergey Kuznetsov, team responsible for exhibition Russia’s Factory – which took place two years ago, also in this pavilion.

Awarded pavilion is divided into two parts, ‘i-city’ and ‘i-land’  contrasting Russia’s past and future, in a highly interactive and subtle way.

Exhibition called secret country ‘i-land’, that’s presented on the ground floor, addresses Russia’s past – curators took as their subject the secret settlements formed during the cold-war period from 1945 until 1989.  More than 60 gated towns and cities were created in the Soviet Union for scientific and technological research. The existence of these cities was kept secret. They were everywhere in the country, and yet it was as if they did not exist. The people who worked within were isolated from society and were sometimes, for the sake of secrecy, given new identities. These cities and their inhabitants were invisible except to the watchful eyes of the secret service.

Addressing the future is the exhibition ‘i-city,’ on the upstairs level, that consists of three rooms with a grid of QR codes wrapping the walls, floors and ceilings – all decoding as information about the Skolkovo project, a new city near Moscow, which promotes architectural and technological innovations in Russian urbanism.

The new city – the Skolkovo innovation centre – is an instrument for transforming science after the end of the Cold war. This is an open city which is being created by some of the world’s most acknowledged architects  including David Chipperfield, Mohsen Mostafavi, OMA, SANAA, Herzog & de Meuron, etc.

This project already involves some of the most important scientific centres in the world and will include a new university and homes for more than 500 firms working in distinct fields of science – IT, biomedical research, nuclear research, energy, and space technology.

Offering probably the best infrastructure for development of science, creators of Skolkovo are hoping to attract some of the world’s advanced scientists.

Photo: Miloš Mirosavić, Ivana Popović, Diana Pereira