Venice Biennale 2010: Cronocaos

Architects – we who change the world – have been oblivious or hostile to the manifestations of preservation. Since 1981, in Portoghesi’s "Presence of the Past", there has been almost no attention paid to preservation in successive architecture Biennales.

OMA and AMO has been obsessed, from the beginning, with the past. Our initial idea for this exhibition was to focus on 26 projects that have not been presented before as a body of work concerned with time and history. In this room, we show the documentary debris of these efforts. But 2010 is the perfect intersection of two tendencies that will have so-far untheorised implications for architecture: the ambition of the global taskforce of ‘preservation’ to rescue larger and larger territories of the planet, and the – corresponding? – global rage to eliminate the evidence of the postwar period of architecture as a social project. In the second room, we show the wrenching simultaneity of preservation and destruction that is destroying any sense of a linear evolution of time. The two rooms together document our period of acute CRONOCAOS.