“Absorbing Modernity: 1914-2014 is an invitation to the national pavilions to show, each in their own way, the process of the erasure of national characteristics in architecture in favor of the almost universal adoption of a single modern language and a single repertoire of typologies.” In this article, originally published on Metropolis Magazine as "Whose Modernity?", Avinash Rajagopal investigates the conflict this mandated theme at the 2014 Venice Biennale unintentionally created between the Northern and Southern pavilions - with Northern pavilions tending to declare sole ownership over Modernism and many Southern pavilions denying that their countries were passive recipients of the North's globalization. For more on how the Southern pavilions challenged the typical conveyance of architectural history, continue reading after the break.
“There is no Modernism in Latvia?” asks the roof of Unwritten, the Latvian pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale. Visitors wander through a cloud of white sheets of paper that answer the question — there is, indeed, Modernist architecture in Latvia, some of it monumental. But its stories are untold because the heyday of Modernism in the Baltic nation was accompanied by a repressive Stalinist regime, followed by many decades of Communism. Not that Latvians have no interest in history — in a statement, the curators bemoan “a wave of uncritical nostalgia” and “a superficial hipster joy at the exotic Soviet heritage.” The complaint is that the better sort of old buildings remains unappreciated. When one of the sheets of paper says, “rest in peace Modernism,” it’s unclear whether this should be read as a call to preservation or a sad acknowledgment that the movement’s history will never be quite as beloved in Latvia as it is elsewhere.
