Jacques Tati made a film Mon Oncle, the visionary work of Cedric Price Fun Palace and Lucius Burckhardt, Clockwork Britain, the Serbian Museum of Revolution, or the derelict and abandoned modernist monuments of Montenegro – national pavilions at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale describe the visions and failures of modern architecture, its shining examples as well as its dark sides. Above all, they open space for a critical evaluation and reinterpretation of modern architecture in the spirit of great themes and bold ideas across national borders.

Rem Koolhaas, the curator of this year's architecture biennale, prepared a grand experiment – employing his favorite laboratory strategy, he tossed into the ring of architectural discourse the hypothesis of the disappearance of national identity in the process of modernization and globalization and waited to see what would happen. This time, he chose a truly spectacular ring – 66 national pavilions of the Venice Biennale. Absorbing modernity 1914 – 2014 Koolhaas likens to a boxing match – just as a boxer must endure the painful blows of his opponent, national states were compelled to absorb modernity and adjust to its developments. The view of the last hundred years clarifies the effect that modernity had on national states and their architecture.
How did the experiment turn out?

The idea of national architecture of individual states proved to be dominant, with a few honorable exceptions, such as the Nordic countries, which opened their pavilion to the previously unrepresented states of Zambia, Tanzania, and Kenya, and the pavilion Czechoslovakia/Slovakia, which connected Czech and Slovak architecture into a common historical narrative of the 20th century. In contrast, the problem of national identity and political representation played a central role in the German pavilion in the form of the so-called Chancellor's Bungalow from Bonn from 1965 or in the Polish pavilion, which exhibits the tomb of General Pilsudski. Other states also relied on the cultural reference framework of the nation-state. Paradoxically, none of the pavilions attempted to thematize Europe as a unified entity that resonates on a global scale.

Rem Koolhaas set the curators of national pavilions (informally) before the necessity to deal with the developments of the last hundred years.
A successful strategy for presenting historical material turned out to be the form of an archive combined with varying degrees of interactivity in its mediation to the public. Switzerland is the most radical, presenting an empty pavilion that only awakens with the arrival of students who explain the work of Cedric Price and Lucius Burckhardt to visitors over folders brought on archival carts from storage. The United States, Uruguay, and Denmark also chose the archive or repository format. The competition for the most overcrowded pavilion bordering on a warehouse was won by Japan, presenting frantic modernization and numerous European ties. Visitors navigate a confusing jumble of references, objects, graphs, iron barrels, etc., discovering new inspirations and correlations for themselves. The Netherlands presents a professionally scientifically processed exhibition based on archival sources in reinterpretation of Jaap Bakema's work and his vision of an open society (I particularly consider the pavilions of Switzerland, the Netherlands, and France, to which I will elaborate below, as excellent). The timeline has become a dominant motif for several pavilions and also one of the major pitfalls if it was transferred too didactically into the exhibition, as in the case of Brazil, Croatia, Iran, Luxembourg, North Macedonia, Peru, South Africa, and several others. In contrast, Cypriot curators dealt playfully with the timeline in the exhibition titled Anatomy of a Wallpaper – the allegory of the wall/paper of the divided city of Nicosia into Greek and Turkish parts records fragmented collages from Cypriot architectural history and layers of collective historical memory.

The biennale is a unique opportunity to turn one's precise, sophisticated Euro-Atlantic gaze to countries that are relatively distant and to seek inspiration and parallels in the unusual architectures of the 20th century. European pavilions are concentrated almost exclusively in the pavilions in Giardini, while exhibitions of so-called third countries are located in Arsenale. From the perspective of the world population, however, the pavilions in Arsenale are at least as numerous (excluding China) as the Euro-Atlantic representation in Giardini (despite the size of the economies of these countries together constituting only one-seventh the size of the economies of the most developed states, excluding China). Significant entities at the biennale have emerged primarily from South American countries, South Asian countries, Japan, and the Balkans, with their distinctly colorful and troubled histories. Worth mentioning is the award-winning pavilion of Chile, which deals with the story of imported prefabricated structures from the Soviet Union, while the Dominican Republic writes its modern history from the devastating hurricane in 1930. Modern architecture in Peru is characterized by the clash of formal top-down modernist tradition with the bottom-up tendency of informal settlements.

Among the broad array of themes and exhibition formats, the notable absence of digital architecture and computer-generated models and forms stands out. This paradox takes on an ironic dimension in the pavilion of Ireland, which presents itself as the most globalized country with headquarters of companies like Google and Microsoft. The exhibition then consists of a simple wooden structure with sails stretched between supports and classic project documentation – floor plans, photographs, and models. This raises the question of the degree of identification of the global architectural community with digital architecture. “Surprisingly,” the topic of women in architecture is still missing from the biennale, which is currently experiencing a significant conjuncture with the rising star of Brazilian architect of Italian origin Lina Bo Bardi and her several concurrent exhibitions this year. The pavilion of Israel Urburb examining the expanding Israeli settlements in the territories of Israel and Palestine since 1949 is seen as controversial. The politically highly contentious construction of Israeli settlements in the territory of the West Bank (illegally occupied by Israel since 1967 and violating the so-called Green Line – the border separating the state of Israel and Palestine approved by the UN) seamlessly incorporates the exhibition into the development of Israeli settlement and legitimizes their construction. This signals the continuing instability and increasing tension in the Middle East. The American pavilion also characterizes a “colonization tendency” – OFFICEUS maps the export of American architecture to third countries and stands in stark contrast to the hand extended by Scandinavian countries to the previously unrepresented African nations – Zambia, Tanzania, and Kenya.

Top 12 of national pavilions:
most innovative exhibition format – Switzerland, Belgium, Cyprus
most chillingly entertaining – Russia
most interesting theme – Netherlands and Jaap Bakema
most minimalist – empty pavilion of Switzerland
most realistic - Germany – in the spirit of get real Germany built a 1:1 model of the Chancellor's Bungalow in the existing pavilion (the bonus is the black Mercedes limousine of Chancellor Helmut Kohl parked in front of the German pavilion)
most expensive pavilion – the spectacular pavilion of Venice designed by Daniel Libeskind
most bleak pavilion – Egypt, traditionally
most political pavilion – Ukraine
most conceptual – Belgium, Poland
smallest – Portugal in the form of excellent newspapers
largest – China, which removed the original tanks from the pavilion and expanded into the forecourt of the pavilion

Switzerland
The Swiss pavilion presents the work of two visionaries, Cedric Price and Lucius Burckhardt. The curator of the pavilion, Hans Ulrich Obrist, chose a radical form of an empty gallery (it references the exhibition by Yves Klein - The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void, Paris, 1958). The open space, dematerialized exhibition intensifies the impact of the ideas of Cedric Price and Lucius Burckhardt. The exhibition installation was co-created by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, students of Lucius Burckhardt.
Technology is the answer, but what was the question? The iconic quote from Cedric Price (1934-2003) resonates today more than ever. His Fun Palace (1961) is a precursor to the Centre Pompidou. He intentionally places entertainment, temporariness, incompleteness, and adaptability at the center of architecture. The form of Fun Palace is continuously determined by the desires of its users. Lucius Burckhardt is considered the inventor of so-called strolollogy (Spaziergangswissenschaft), the science of walking. As a sociologist teaching at ETH Zurich, in Kassel, and at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, he focused on the democratization of the urban planning process, interventions in public space, and the intense involvement of rituals and habits in architectural design. Neither of the exhibited authors built any real projects, but their conceptual thinking about architecture is instructive for the present. “The radical positions of Lucius Burckhardt and Cedric Price do not in any way represent the inflationary and pragmatic architecture of our country. Therefore, presenting these positions in the Swiss pavilion at Venice 2014 is not an eccentric idea but a fundamental necessity.” (Ch. Kerez)

Netherlands
The Dutch pavilion celebrates Jaap Bakema, a leading post-war architect, whose work combined the heroic efforts of post-war reconstruction with the idealistic vision of an open society. The open society for Bakema had a liberal character designed to absorb various different positions, life attitudes, and styles that transcended boundaries of ideology and other dogmas. The framework of the welfare state allowed for the fulfillment of these visions of a democratic society founded on personal freedom, capitalist production, and collective responsibility. Buildings like Lijnbaan in Rotterdam were largely made possible by the generous system of the welfare state that was established in Western Europe after World War II.
The pavilion updates this strong concept of democratic society while also showcasing Bakema's great architecture with his sense of mass composition, open structures, and his ability to think in monumental scale for representative public buildings as well as human scale for public spaces. Bakema was significantly involved in the last phase of CIAM and was at the origin of TEAM X – the pavilion includes documentation of this generational split, Bakema's dramatic misunderstanding with Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and other representatives of the pre-war functionalist avant-garde.

France
The curator of the French pavilion is the excellent architectural historian Jean Louis Cohen. The exhibition bears the skeptical title: Modernity, promise or menace and presents 4 episodes of modern architecture from 1935 to 1975. The pavilion opens with the film Mon Oncle featuring the Arper villa in the leading role – a house as an object of desire, embodying modern housing, a technological utopia in which everything communicates, transforming into a grotesque parody of modern architecture and technology. In other rooms, we find elegant, ultra-light metal constructions by Jean Prouvé, the story of mass prefabrication, and the dystopian case of the first prefabricated housing estate La Muette, which the Germans used as a detention camp during World War II due to its complete isolation. Cohen reminds us of the ideals and expectations of modern architecture in housing – sunlight, modern style, hygiene, etc., and the subsequent disillusionment after World War II manifested in monotonous construction and dramatic isolation of functions.