The epidemic and resulting situation this year has forced us to change the format of the official opening of the Slovenian pavilion at the 17^th International Architecture Exhibition of La Bienalle di Venezia. We will begin our online reporting with a virtual walk through the exhibition and continue with an interview with the team of curators and the commissioner. The speakers Blaž Babnik Romaniuk, Martina Malešič, Rastko Pečar, Asta Vrečko, and Matevž Čelik will describe the common thread of the project, trace how the project was designed and executed, and present research findings while discussing the need for interior public space, the relevance of buildings that constitute social infrastructure, such as cooperative centres, and other issues that this subject opens up. One of our references will be the central question of the Biennale, how will we live together?, which has never been more topical than at the moment when we were denied the possibility to live together.

Due to the epidemic, the opening ceremony and social event that will welcome more visitors in the pavilion have been moved to 24 September 2021, when we hope to be able to present the pavilion to larger audiences at the same time as many similar events take place in other national pavilions.

The project focuses on the Cooperative Centre – a multipurpose public building most often set in a rural context. In villages, small towns, and suburban areas they serve as venues for various administrative, economic, social, and cultural activities. The cooperative centre has a specific architectural typology, whose purpose is to create an indoor public space that usually serves as a central space in the community, a place of social interaction, and a hub that serves a range of local community needs. The architecture of the cooperative centre serves not only as a background to the activities that take place there – with its flexible layout, manageable technical execution and restrained design it opens up and maintains the possibilities for ongoing interaction between users and the space that supports their activities. The project thus offers an insight into the history of cooperative centres, the launching and course of construction (with more than 330 cooperative centres built across the Slovenian territory in the span of only a couple of years) as well as their present-day role in society, as most of them are still publicly owned and used.

Join us for the interview and the virtual tour of the pavilion!

The event will be streamed on MAO’s YouTube channel.