The Hungarian Exhibition of the Biennual in Venice
Venice Biennal, Giardini, 28 Junue – 27 November 2016

Curators: Gábor Fábián, Dénes Fajcsák
Text: György Szegő
Photos: József Rosta / Ludwig Múzeum

Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, the chief curator of the 15th Biennial of Architecture in Venice used a national example to explain the „new viewpoint”. He wished to illustrate the position which architecture fails to acquire being a guilty party in overdeveloping projects of the world. The photo shows Marie Reiche, the elderly German archaeologist researching the Nazca lines in a stone desert. She sets up her aluminium ladder and climbs it in order to understand what remains invisible from her horizon when standing in the sea of stones. What contemporary architects cannot sense as they simply keep on „sailing” in the concrete ocean of the real estate and construction industry boom which affects the entirety of Planet Earth. It is the fact that the globe has already been built up and in. Gábor Fábián and Dénes Fajcsik, the architects winning the tender for the Hungarian pavilion have drawn a sustainable model of reconstructing the building which is now life-threatening so as to respond to local needs: it has been standing empty in the garden named after Gárdonyi in Eger, and rapidly deteriorating. The structure is going to be reconstructed and remodelled without receiving any sponsoring from the state or the local authority so as to function as a self-sustaining institution housing cultural contents.