Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA

This poetic, precise response to the theme of FREESPACE touches another note, expresses another sensibility, which differs from our own perception of space. We very much welcome this ingredient in the Venice Biennale. The idea of FREESPACE being a spiral, with no beginning and no end; the idea that it is an almost invisible coil, barely forming an enclosure, a thin film of material suggesting a separation between inside and outside. This somehow describes an alternative view of the world. An alternative to mass and weight. An invisible structure, the form itself being the structure.
The work of SANAA always evokes for us, this feeling of spaces and buildings sitting lightly on the earth. The Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne with its big undulating concrete underbelly, feels like a cloud or a wave washing over the site on its way to somewhere else. The ambition expressed by SANAA for many of their projects, is that the building should not draw attention to itself. Buildings such as the Louvre Lens Museum in northern France or the Grace Farm Building in the United States, are so finely tuned that the thinness of the elements of roof and columns endows the buildings with a wonderful, luminous ethereal quality, as has their installation here.
YF+SMcN