Opening Statement

PLATFORM AUSTRIA
17th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia

We began working on our Biennale project – which is titled PLATFORM AUSTRIA and addresses the rising phenomenon of what we call platform urbanism – well before the start of the current global health crisis. Of course, this crisis has brought about many changes. And these include a new level of awareness of the increasing “platformisation” of our lives. Indeed, we are now perhaps more aware of this phenomenon than we would like to be.

Over the last year, we’ve all learned a lot about digital platforms. Having to stay at home because of the current pandemic has meant having to get used to these platforms in order to be able to get on with our lives. As a result, we’ve seen how platforms have completely changed the way we interact – the way we work, learn, shop, entertain ourselves and socialize. Wherever we are in the world: The way we use platforms is not only having a massive impact on us as people. It is also transforming our cities.

— Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer

The rise of platforms to become the decisive form of social and economic interaction in the 21st century is more than just a question of technological progress. While we are slowly becoming accustomed to the operators of digital platforms breaking records on the financial markets, they themselves are already focusing on overriding systems and organisational forms in spheres such as politics, education and healthcare, but also on designing new life-worlds and building completely restructured cities

A type of platform mentality – characterized by constant circulation and networking, by stylised aesthetics and an emphasis on imagery, and by sensorially controlled environments – is gaining increasing influence on contemporary architecture and town planning. The wish for immediate gratification in a “city-on-demand” is fuelling an obsession with speculative urban development and increasingly displacing long-term planning.

Under the title of PLATFORM AUSTRIA curators Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer are taking up two fundamental aspects of the new platform culture and using them as conceptual guidelines for the exhibition in the Austrian Pavilion at the Biennale Architettura 2021:

1. The focus on conversation: The possibility of being actively and continually “in conversation” with innumerable participants is the life blood of platform economies. This uninterrupted connection offers the guarantee of being able to register changes rapidly and react to them flexibly.
2. The promise of future potential: By offering access to the capital of continuous conversation – whether in the form of virtual communication networks or built environments that bundle encounters – platforms present themselves as the optimal structure for access to future potentials.

In order to stimulate reflection and debate about the changes initiated by platform urbanism – global technology monopolies, the digitalisation of private life, changed forms of work, new social exclusions – the Austrian Pavilion will be transformed into a conversational space focusing on future potentials and their architecture and will thereby itself become a platform for the duration of the exhibition.