Rem Koolhaas, the selected Director of the Architecture section of the Venice Biennale, has announced the title and theme of the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale: Fundamentals.

“Fundamentals will be a Biennale about architecture, not architects. After several Biennales dedicated to the celebration of the contemporary, Fundamentals will focus on histories – on the inevitable elements of all architecture used by any architect, anywhere, anytime (the door, the floor, the ceiling etc.) and on the evolution of national architectures in the last 100 years. In three complementary manifestations – taking place in the Central Pavilion, the Arsenale, and the National Pavilions – this retrospective will generate a fresh understanding of the richness of architecture’s fundamental repertoire, apparently so exhausted today.”

“National identity has seemingly been sacrificed to modernity,” Koolhaas said in a statement. “Ideally, we would want the represented countries to engage a single theme – Absorbing Modernity: 1914-2014 – and to show, each in their own way, the process of the erasure of national characteristics in favour of the almost universal adoption of a single modern language in a single repertoire of typologies.”

the 14th International Architecture Exhibition is to take place June 7th to November 23rd 2014.

For more information please visit www.labiennale.org