Aaron Betsky (Director of Venice Biennale of Architecture 2008)
I think that the boundaries between art architecture and design are becoming more and more fluid. That doesn't mean architecture does not have a particular contribution to make. In art, in architecture and design, the question is how can we map the world around us. How can we represent it and renew it and how can we see our work as assembly, a reorganisation, a re-articulation perhaps an opening up of the world around us. You can see it in design -Drog design pioneered many of these ideas-, you can see it in art- many artists are working on these issues. And I think you can also see it in architecture: we are beginning to see buildings not as new constructions but as re-assemblies or as an opening up of what already exists. Having said this, I believe architecture from its tradition has a particular contribution to make. Architecture has an ability to understand the reality around us at many different scales, both material scales but also scales of abstraction. Architecture understands both the physicality of the brick, the brick as a module and the brick as part of a building construction and an equation of financial issues and code issues. It is that ability to think from the very abstract to the very concrete that architecture, among other things, can offer. Architecture also invented the religion of space. After all space is like faith: you have to believe in it because otherwise it doesn't exist: you can't touch see or smell it. That religion, that faith, is also what moves beyond building, that makes us believe that there is a reason why we need to re-assemble our environment, that somehow we can find a space in which we can be in relationship to ourselves, the world around us, and to others. That also answers the question of the local and the global. It is architecture which allows us to place ourselves in the world, to understand ourselves as being in one place, in relationship to a much larger environment. And it uses its particular framing devices, its choreography of space, its ability to assemble materials to give us that particular relationship and allows us to be at home in the modern world.