We are finished

Over the past months we have been hosting the Nordic pavilion. We have been open for 79 full days, during which our guests could see the workings of and communicate with in total some 75 architects associated with 12 different practices. Our daily updated blog has had visits from 78 countries. We like to think that this is in direct line with the general theme of this year's Venice biennale, "People meet in architecture", and hope that it will contribute to a broader understanding of how architecture could work. As a summary, you will find below one picture of each of the weeks At Work With has been open. After that, you will find all the blog posts in the regular reversed order, starting with the newest post, and ending with the oldest post.

Office party

The press and opening days were turned into an office party. We served cold beer from the fridge, played loud music, with occasional announcements, and sung some karaoke in the evenings.

Testbedstudio

Testbedstudio orchestrated a range of events, such as lectures, video screenings, live drawing and building a small city out of styrofoam. They also re-enacted other pavilions of the biennale. Here Dr. Wolfgang Kessling from Transsolar is visiting while remaking their and Tetsuo Kondo's "Cloudscapes" pavilion.

0047

During their week, 0047 devoted one day each to presenting their current projects, in the form of lectures and discussions, sometimes over air from other locations. They also introduced what became a recurring weekly event: the friday after work beer for the staff of all the national pavilions.

XYM

XYM worked on an edition of their PDF magazine. They also produced a series of fantastic multicolour styrofoam USB cases, which each hosts the whole collection of the magazine.

Svensk Standard

Frenzied work, with the table filled with oozing electronics, Svensk Standard made a model of Venice on the floor of the pavilion, including many findings from the city, paper gondolas and mechanical robots guised as urban debris.

Economy

In order to spark discussion, Economy directed their and the visitors' attention to the making of a film. A circular rotating disc was turned into a stage that was constantly filled with modelling paraphernalia, making one lapse a day and architecture into a party.

Conditions

Conditions magazine devoted their week to the topic of their upcoming issue: Competitions. They hosted seminars on competitions, they turned the neighbouring exhibition Stay in Touch into a competition with the visitors voting for the best project exhibited, awarded with the "Golden Reindeer" trophy, and they turned the design of the magazine cover into a competition for the pavilion visitors, spawning immense activity on the drawing tables.

Uglycute

Uglycute had a cool week (when the first autumn chill hit Venice, necessitating some very practical designs towards the heating issue). They worked on new projects (again, a sauna) and displayed finished ones. This included a woodworking film set up among the trees in the pavilion.

Schalk / Sustersic

This is Apolonija Sustersic and Meike Schalk in a seminar situation around their "rizomatic library", books and authors that are connected into a network. Most of their week, though, was devoted to a public workshop for making t-shirts. The visitors chose, edited and discussed motifs which in different ways made a statement on the practice of architecture, and which they could consequently print on their own t-shirt to be.

Byggstudio

Byggstudio made a kind of interactive garden, in which the visitors could rearrange different species of plants according to certain parameters. These would change daily, giving rise to the formation of graphs, fields, ranking lists, and associative combinations, all manifested within the greenery, demonstrating the social relationships between man and plants.

Rintala Eggertsson

This week At Work With turned into a building workshop, when Rintala Eggertsson entered the stage with a band of students. They focused all their effort on the construction of a four by four by four metre building out of wooden beams, structurally reminiscent of the Nordic pavilion, interiorly forming seats with a fireplace in the middle. The name of the work is Miilu, which is Finnish for charcoal kiln.

Boing Being

During the week, Boing Being carried out a continuous and improvised construction of a physical body out of scrap material, in parallel with the production of automatically translated poetry. In the same time, all visitors were invited to make their own drawings. In a final performance evening, all of this came together as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk. A selection of the drawings was projected onto the physical construction, and the poetry was read aloud.

Fantastic Norway

Fantastic Norway ended the show with a week devoted to the "spikertelt" - the tent that is mounted in front of a caravan - a theme that was elaborated in models, drawings and text through the week. They ended their own show with a big waffle party.

Packed up

The pavilion is back to its original state again. It took just a day for our technician Markus Eberle and Swedish Museum of Architecture curator Karin Åberg Waern to dismantle the exhibition and make it ready for shipment back to the North.

Waiting to go home

The French Norwegian is waiting to go home.