Release Architecture: Incidental Space by Christian Kerez

An architecture biennale can be more than a place to simply represent and celebrate the status quo in architectural production. Exhibitions are increasingly becoming a place for researching and producing an experimental and critical architectural practice: a place not for the presentation of finished products, but for the production of content. This calls into question the supposed boundary between architecture and exhibition. Inquiry becomes a form of display.

Christian Kerez’s Incidental Space, exhibited in the Swiss Pavilion at the 2016 Architecture Biennale in Venice, attempts to inquire into the outer limits of what can be achieved in architecture today—in terms of both technical feasibility and the limits of our own imagination. How can you use the medium of architecture to contemplate an architectural space that is entirely abstract and as complex as possible? How could this kind of imaginary space even be visualized, and how could it be produced?

Conceived in close collaboration with Sandra Oehy, the curator of the Swiss Pavilion, and Christian Kerez, the Swiss Pavilion architect, this issue of ARCH+ delves into the questions posed by Kerez’s “speculative space.” Contributors like Philip Ursprung, Mario Carpo, Armen Avanessian, and Timothy Morton consider how the object stands in relation to the subject in a world where the capacity for technological and digital reproduction increasingly renders the distinction between depiction and reality moot. Where is the space for architectural autonomy in this? How can we “Release Architecture”? A report from architecture’s speculative front.