British Pavillion 8th Venice Biennale

Location: Venice, Italy

Client: British Council

Date: 2002

Area: 250m2

Budget: £55,000

Team credits:
FOA Partner in charge: Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Farshid Moussavi
Project Architect: Friedrich Ludewich
Design Team: Niccolo Cadeo, Nerea Calvillo, Marco Guarnieri, Clara Joerger, Ann Kathrin Kirschner, Kenichi Matsuzawa, Francesco Moncada

Commissioner for the British Pavilion: Andrea Rose

Deputy Commissioners: Emily Campbell, Brendan Griggs

Curator: Ruth Ur

Assistant Curator: Alison Moloney

Executive Arts: Luisa Trabucchi

Arts Assistant: Marina Machelli

Visual Arts Press Officer: Sarah Gillett

Technical Team: Tony Connor, Chris Hands

Sponsored by NEC Projectors UK

To bring the Venice Biennale of Architecture in line with the Venice Biennale of Art, the British Council in 2002 decided to select just one practice to be represented within the Pavilion. Foreign Office Architects were chosen to present a site-specific installation in the British pavilion. The theme of that year’s international exhibition was Next, curated by Dejan Sudjic, British architecture critic and editor.

In the light of the general theme of the Venice Biennale, we used our Yokohama International Port Terminal project as one of the projects that embraced some of the emerging questions in the field at the time, and to illustrate and discuss their architectural potential.

FOA transformed the British pavilion into a dark labyrinthine space in which the visitor moved through a sequence of rooms, each dedicated to a different aspect of the project: Landscape; Borderlessness; Growth; Complexity; Tools & Technology. In the heart of the exhibition was a room with images revealing the Yokohama Terminal itself. Using state-of-the-art projectors, FOA created a spectacular virtual and immersive space.