The rise of the internet has radically changed how we inhabit space. Thus, for the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, Estonia’s pavilion will focus on how this change is applied to the practice of architecture. Titled Interspace, the exhibition will be a single room that digitally showcases the physical act of placemaking.
Two opposite walls in the exhibition will be used to project images of the former military defense ring of the Estonian city of Talinn, which has been subjected to a series of architectural interventions to make it more accessible to the public. One wall of the pavilion will display the architects’ intent for how the city's spaces were to be used, while the opposite wall will display how the public has appropriated these spaces and how it chooses to use them today. The "interspace" between these walls, as the architects describe, is “a negotiation of the two—a space of split agency and authorial ambiguity. Visitors act there based on individual data-flows, while at the same time leaving a sustaining digital footprint of their activities in this collective space that collects variation.”
More simply put, the floor of the exhibition space will track visitors’ footsteps, displaying their paths of movement through the space. This will create a floor map that shows where occupation within the space is heaviest, recording the interaction between the architecture and the people who inhabit it.
To further emphasize the exhibition’s dual nature between the physical and digital, Interspace will have a virtual sister pavilion that can be accessed online, starting June 5th, at www.enterinterspace.ee.
The project is being produced by the Estonian Centre of Architecture, and is curated by Johanna Jõekalda, Johan Tali, and Siim Tuksam, with physical computing assistance from Reinis Adovičs. Ülar Mark and Lill Sarv are Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner respectively for Interspace.
