Empowerment of Aesthetics —
Venice Architecture Biennale

What do butterflies, quantum mechanics, poetry, and dirt have to do with architecture? In the Danish pavilion of the Venice Biennale, you were invited to sense, wonder, be curious, and reflect when you meet the smell of dirt, read Niels Bohr’s letter to Einstein, hear the sound of poetry, and bury your toes in pine needles. The pavilion reintroduces the forgotten power of aesthetics as the complementary to the rational. It argues that the two together should form the foundation for our future decision-making.

Bohr and Einstein debated the complementarity of quantum mechanics almost a hundred years ago. In the Danish pavilion, Stig L. Andersson argues that Bohr’s philosophical aesthetic approach – and the forgotten modernity it represents – is critical for our common road into a sustainable future. The Danish pavilion reintroduces the power of aesthetics as an essential complementarity to the rational.

A forgotten modernity meets the future

The curator of the 14^th International Architecture Biennale, Rem Koolhaas has asked the national exhibitions to adhere to the legacy of the previous century. By inventing The Nordic Welfare State Denmark assigned architecture a crucial role in planning and, almost obsessively, designing in detail the physical setting for a 20th-century modern, urban, democratic lifestyle. However, today this authentic integration of architecture and welfare culture can no longer be taken for granted. We need to rethink our common future and recall the aesthetic qualities of modernity and let them meet the more dominant rationalistic approach.

Butterflies and poetry

In the exhibition, you are invited to sense, wonder, be curious, and reflect when you meet the smell of dirt, read Niels Bohr’s letter to Einstein, hear the sound of poetry and bury your toes in pine needles.

The exhibition ’Empowerment of Aesthetics’ insists on a new sensuous and sustainable symbiosis between rationality and aesthetics – between architecture and nature. It is a reflection on the fundamentals of the modern Danish society, which emerged in the mid19th Century: The short pocket of time after the collapse of Romanticism but before the heralded Danish welfare state fully emerged; where the poetic interaction between architecture, literature, art, nature, and science liberated unprecedented energy and a belief in a dynamic society hitherto unseen in Denmark and elsewhere

In 2015, our official exhibition catalog was honored with The Association for Book-Craft’s award for Best Bookwork of the Year. You can find the catalog digitally on Issue and order a physical copy here.