When Niklas Bildstein Zaar heard that his architecture studio, SubWas hired to design the main show at this year’s architecture Biennale, he knew it was a strange choice. Over the past decade, his company established in Berlin has made a name for designing extensive stage sets, for rappers such as Travis Scott and Ye, and for the Balenciaga Buzzy fashion shows.
Along the way, the company helped set up a sober post -industrial visual language that has become omnipresent online: apocalyptic but shiny, with dark colors and a lot of concrete. “Our palette came from worlds where a counterculture had manifested itself,” said Bildstein Zaar in an interview. “We work with materials that have a kind of attitude.”
During a recent visit to the company’s studio, in the Tiergarten district of Berlin, the design was a funeral mix of Goth and high -tech. Paintings in shades of black and gray hung on the walls and a frightening rubber mask decorated a counter. There was a sculpture of a grim mower -like figure in a corner in a corner in the Bildstein Zaar office.
For the Venice task, Sub must reinvent its approach for a less flashy context. The biennial, that opens on May 10Is the world’s most prestigious architecture exhibition, and Bildstein Zaar said that he hoped that the experience of his company in fashion and art would make the event attractive for a new kind of visitor. “If it succeeded in dressing something else,” said Bildstein Zaar, “it could get a much larger audience.”
Just like his art counterpart, which took place last year, the Venice Architecture Biennale has a large -scale central exhibition, plus individual pavilions that exhibit lands organize separately. For the main show, Sub designed a system for presenting the exhibitions, which were selected separately by the curatorial team of the event, and for guiding visitors through the show.
The result is more parried than the violent indoors storm or the flooded hall that has supplied sub for its Balenciaga shows: a network of reconfigurable columns covered with aluminum shells and with esoterically shaped pieces of 3D aggregate. According to the design director of Sub, Sophia Kuhn, the concept is intended to display ‘natural’, ‘collective’ and ‘artificial’ forms of intelligence, and the display will be combined with a digital app designed by Sub that functions as an AI-driven personalized guides.
‘Spatial Intellens’, the app uses a learning model that is trained on hundreds of photos of the exhibition and text of exhibitors. It will answer the questions of visitors about the content of the show and give suggestions about how they can navigate through the exhibition, depending on the interests of the visitor.
The curator of the exhibition, Carlo Ratti, said by telephone that he chose Sub because the work in fashion and music had shown that it “had the capacity to make contact with a larger audience.” The app, he said, was an experiment that would make the show exciting for visitors who were not architects themselves and otherwise have difficulty dissecting some of the copper exhibitions, including complex architectural models and conceptual installations.
But he added that he was also attracted by the capacity of the studio to manage complicated projects, which was mainly crucial in this year’s extensive exhibition, with 750 participants, much more than the 2023 edition.
The variety of scale of the exhibitions, from the “very small” to the “very large”, made the work particularly challenging, Ratti said. The design of the exhibition “was about performing a bottom-up analysis” of all projects that can be seen and to bring them together in one “large fractal organism”.
Bildstein Zaar is aware that the assignment is a new kind of challenge for the company that he founded in 2017. A self -removing Swede with a preference for black clothing, Bildstein Zaar grew up in Kiruna, a city north of the Arctic Circle that, in a dark turn, was slowly chosen in the ground because of a nearby mine.
“My parental home is probably in a mining pit at the moment,” he said. “That’s quite a metaphor, I think.”
The early minimalist designs of Sub for Balenciaga stores and the work of Bildstein Zaar with Anne Imhof, a German artist who won the Golden Lion in 2017 on the Art Biennial of Venice, shared a rough, gloomy aesthetics that are often associated with the Techno -Scene, where in Berlin. Kuhn, the design director, said that the nightlife of the city had been an inspiration for many of her designs.
But the studio attracted more attention after a series of provocative fashion shows for Balenciaga, in which the brand gestures on hot-button political issues: economic inequality, pollution, geopolitics conflict.
Sub has designed a set reminiscent of the European Parliament for the Spring/Summer 2020 show of the brand, which suggested a new crisis in the identity of the continent after Brexit. In a theatrical refund on climate change during the next fall/winter show of the brand, Balenciaga and sub -supervision of the flood of the catwalk kept the models through an inch oily water.
In an e -mail, Demna, the mononymic fashion designer who became Gucci’s artistic director in July, described after almost a decade at the helm of Balenciaga, the flooded show as his most “memorable” collaboration with the studio. The cinematic drama of the show, he wrote, was ‘an iconic moment’.
Other projects, including the 2022 Balenciaga show in which models were pelted with fake snow, just a few weeks after Russia had launched its full invasion of Ukraine, did countless social media memes. Kuhn said that the studio often tries to make a single “big gesture” that will translate well into apps such as Instagram.
But Bildstein Zaar argued that the studio had now partially become a victim of his own success, and noted that the raw, post -industrial aesthetics he had popular with Balenciaga had led to a whole series of imitators. “A part of the language we put there is a bit exhausted at the moment,” said Bildstein Zaar.
The architecture biennial, he said, meant a shift for the studio to a more conceptual and technology -driven approach that would be applied to future projects.
At an office computer, Christopher Blohm, the digital director of the company – demonstrated everything in black, including leather boots with raised pyramids on the toes – ‘Spatial Intellens’. He picked up a slim interface where users can write questions or analyze photos of the show. The app would put together a profile of every visitor while dealing with it, explained Blohm, adding that the technology had been developed in collaboration with AI experts, a psychologist and philosopher.
“It can tell you what kind of person you are and how you deal with the content,” said Blohm. The goal, he said, was to use the experiences of visitors to improve the suggestions of the model about the wingspan of the Biennale, which will run until November, which would eventually increase a “collective” intelligence. If nothing else, he hoped that even the most dense works of the Biennale would be accessible to daily visitors.
“It creates a kind of fingerprint for you, based on where you have done what you are interested in,” said Blohm. As you look at the biennial, he added: “It looks back at you.”
