Danish Pavilion

Empowerment of Aesthetics

The contribution of landscape culture to art and science is writ large in the Danish Pavilion where a blend of artificial natures -- bark on walls, pine needle floors aesthetics, contrasts with technocratic papers covering Danish building law, housing law, planning law and the Danish Environmental Act.

'Technocratic papers' cover the walls and ceiling in one area - including an environmental act. Photo Credit: Andrea Avezzù Courtesy La Biennale Di Venezia

The Danish Pavilion, charged with both Koolhaas' Absorbing Modernity theme and Denmark in the year 2050, looks at modernist legacies for overwhelming factual information, legislation and scientific data and the need for a more complementary future vision that curator Stig Andersson beleives 'can open up yet again the missing dimension of aesthetics as an important aspect when we make our decisions'.

For Andersson , director of landscape practice SLA based in Copenhagen, 'aesthetics and rationality are actually two radically different paths to knowledge and recognition. One way, the aesthetic, is empirical knowledge and experience through sensory experiences. The other way is common sense, the deductive practice in which conclusions are logically obtained,' citing the Golden Age (1800 -1850) where the two views were interwoven in one culture.

Nature invades the pavilion as the contribution of landscape to science and art is explored. Photo Credit: Andrea Avezzù Courtesy La Biennale Di Venezia

In this way they mimic the UK when the term 'culture' also referred to farmland, where cultivation of the land enabled a person to become cultured and the 18th-century estate was also understood as a key moment when nature and culture were interdependent in meanings of the term 'landscape'.