May 2010 1359, VOLUME CCXXVIII

Can radically abstracted architecture sustain encounter and engagement?

‘People meet in architecture’ is the theme of this year’s Venice Biennale, which will be overseen by Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima (the biennale’s first female director), who, with SANAA partner Ryue Nishizawa, was recently awarded the 2010 Pritzker Prize.

‘People meet in architecture’ is a characteristically nebulous theme for a biennale, capable of being appropriated in multitude of tangential ways. But in its haiku-like simplicity it contains a simple and undeniable truth. Buildings are places for encounter and engagement, and consciously or not, architecture shapes and structures these encounters.

This truth is borne out and given a new twist by SANAA’s latest building, a new learning centre in Lausanne , which conceives of a new kind of loose, informal, internal landscape of undulating floors and roofs. Like balls in a pinball machine, students and staff spill and ricochet around the spaces, the idea being that the building is essentially one large room, where anyone can meet with anyone.

Some critics have questioned this extreme level of simplification and abstraction, and it might be interesting to return after the excitement of the opening has subsided, to see just how this ‘big room’ works in practice. Nonetheless, SANAA’s determination to try and see things anew encapsulates a questing, pioneering spirit, which seems still undaunted by the challenges of scale and programme. For now, Sejima and Nishizawa should savour what seems to be turning into their annus mirabilis.

Catherine Slessor