Archinect has collected dozens of images of work to appear in this year�s Venice Biennale. In the upcoming exhibition, titled Metamorph, over 170 firms will display their work alongside eight 1:1 scale installations. Here is a sample.

 

One day 1:1 by Ben van Berkel
This time, our motto is �let�s not explain, let�s not represent�.
Architecture is most entertaining 1: 1, when it is at your scale, the scale of the person it was made for�This time, we are taking gamble. We want you to believe in our building, the future Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart, complete with its unique geometry, its endless plan, and the time machine that is its museological principle. But most of all we want to show you what it will feel like, not explain to you where the entrance will be, where floor will hit wall. What we really want to do is take you there, with us, to the building site where it does exist quite yet, but will� one day.
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Concert House in Stavanger by PLOT
We have tried to develop the concert house as an extension and enhancement of the movements and activities that already flow through the site.
The concert house will be the music park�s extension to the water, the destination of the blue promenade and the Bjergsted�s smooth transformation from the top of the rock to the edge of the water.
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Greenwich St. project by archi-tectonics
The setback intervals allow for terraces with views towards the Hudson River. This roof top landscape allows the outside in with its large reflecting glass windows in a mediated transition. The new building�s angled fa�ade with reflecting glass planes integrate urban and private environments.
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ARCAM by Rene van Zuuk
Located on Amsterdam�s waterfront, this building houses the exhibition and office space of the ARCAM, the Amsterdam Center for Architecture. Its zinc-coated aluminum skin is tautly wrapped around a steel frame. Construction is complete and the building is open to the public.
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Lexington Plaza International Design Competition by xefirotarchby xefirotarch
The Park mediates between the private sphere and the city offering a multitude of interiors events, dictated by the dynamism of the urban fabric. The Park cites the power of perspective, of seeing not just looking. This is what we call a standard, what we call translation, what we call architecture.
The park positions itself on the pedestrian level of the city as a fluid continuum of existing public paths and places. The light spaces, opened to the city, seem like a �public square�, drawing in pedestrian movement through the creation of a simultaneously horizontal and vertical composition.
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NYC2012 Olympic village by Morph0sis
Informed by a commitment to sustainability, connectivity and interdependence, our design transforms Hunter�s Point into a revitalized new territory that will leave an important legacy to the city with 43 acres of open space reserved for both urban and natural parkland.
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Publicis Drugstore by Michele Saee
The building is an assembly of sculptural forms fluctuating around a more structured, solid central body. In compositional terms, the building is distant from the idea of the explosion which underlies the architecture of Saee�s masters, but rather returns to the lightweight elegance of fabrics, with their sinuous folds dressing a composite body in motion. The form of the building does not seem to be the result of assembly of a series of separate fragments but rather a single body in which each element is a surprise.-Michele Saee�s fluid spaces from floornature.com
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The Novartis� Campus Main Gate, Park and Parking Facilities by Foreign Office Architecture
Novartis is a company dedicated to life sciences, to the investigation and manipulation of nature. Our proposal for the Novartis Campus Main Gate and Traffic Interface arises from a reflection on the current status of biotechnology in the context of contemporary culture as an increasingly important domain of knowledge between the Natural and the Artificial. In this proposal we have attempted to produce an assemblage between the two components of the project �the park and the parking- as a speculation on how the artificial and natural processes may be able to generate new forms of mutual enhancement.
More than ever before, the natural and the artificial are literally merging into each other. GM food, animal cloning, organic prosthetics, biological computers, the human genome� are the indexes of an era when the distinction between nature and artifice have become obsolete both to describe and to produce the environment of the 21st Century.
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Bullring Barcelona 2oo4 by Richard Rogers and Alonso Balaguer y Arquitectos Asociados
RRP has been appointed by Sacresa to redevelop an existing Bullring in Barcelona into a major mixed leisure/entertainment complex. The site is strategically located at the foothill of Montjuic and at the intersection of two major vehicular routes in the city of Barcelona. It will act as a gateway into the city from the west and a major landmark for the Placa Espana transport interchange area.
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Hohenb�hl Housing Project, Zurich by agps architecture
We are in the heart of the city of Zurich: from a structural viewpoint, buildings, streets, parks and properties are pocket-sized. Divisions are characteristically small, but also properties for exclusive residential buildings.
In architecture, the notion of luxury implies vast spatial dimensions. However, here, in the center of Zurich, at the site of the Hohenb�hl Project, the lavish gesture is different.
The facade performs this differentiation by presenting itself in festive dress. Two volumetrically simple buildings surrounded by a multipart cover compose the project's centerpiece. The two buildings enter the scene gleaming and dazzling in this sheathe. In an analogy to clothing, the sunscreen � the garment's pi�ce de r�sistance � presents itself as a magnificent coat that both protects and represents.
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GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, TAICHUNG, TAIWAN by Zaha Hadid
The design proposal is based on the concept of the museum as an ever-changing event space. To emphasize the aspect of transformability of the space we would like to explore the possibility to equip the new museum with something like a "stagemachinery".
We devised a series of large-scale kinetic elements that offer the option to radically transform the arrangement of the gallery spaces. We would also like to make this dramatic transformation of the space itself a spectacle, visible even on the outside appearance of the building. Thus the internal reconfiguration of the exhibition spaces creates a public sensation within the urban scenery.
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The Sage Gateshead by Foster and Partners
The Sage Gateshead, an international home for music and musical discovery, will be a landmark on Tyneside, forming the heart of an exciting project to regenerate the area�s river frontage catering for an expected half-million visitors each year. The site is adjacent to the new pedestrian Gateshead Millennium Bridge and the Tyne Bridge with its great arch, which is echoed in the shell-like form of the Sage�s roof.
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Mirian Gallerie by Mark Goulthorpe (deCOI)
The Mirian Gallerie is part of an interior renovation of a Parisian atelier that will be a fashion showroom. It is conceived as a complex-curved shell that stretches the space of the gallery as it curls tautly to fill the space. It is to be built of laminated plywood cut by numeric command machine, creating a homogenous field of materiality (walls, floor, ceiling one continuous surface). The end-grain of the wood creates a dizzying level of surface detail the extremities of objects and space generating intense surface/material patterning.
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Vacheron Constantin Headquarters by Tschumi Architects
The concept for this building is based on the idea of a thin, flexible envelope. The exterior surface is formed from a metallic sheet that unrolls over the surface's geometry, while the interior is clad with wood veneer. The resulting space is sleek and precise outside, warm and inviting inside. The logic of unrolling makes the building appear almost unenclosed. The envelope opens to welcome workers and visitors, admitting ample direct light on the north side and filtered light on the south side.
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Field of rods Smithsonian Patent Office Building by Eric Owen Moss
Fortuitously, the buildings� original purpose � the display of inventor�s models submitted with patent applications � embodies a spirit of technical and artistic progress that the existing building will share with the newly enclosed courtyard.
The roof design that encloses the Patent Office Building courtyard is poetically and technically unprecedented: a dense vertical amalgamation of glass and steel rods of varying lengths offers an ever-changing presence of light and sky viewed through a spectacular, Segurat-like field of shinning points. Simultaneously the composite structure reaffirms the prominence of the original courtyard experience -- the granite and sandstone walls that form the "great room", now sharpened and re-focused in a new, reflected light.
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Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts by diller scofidio + renfro
Once derided as an urbanistic mistake, an �Acropolis for the cultural elite,� and the embodiment of �Monumental Modernism,� a term normally applied to fascist architecture, Lincoln Center has become a valued icon inextricably linked with New York City. Rather than transforming the identity of Lincoln Center, our aim is to make Lincoln Center more Lincoln Center than Lincoln Center, that is, to amplify its most successful attributes while teasing out its unrealized potential. The architectural challenge is to interpret the genetic code of the architecture into a language that can speak to a diverse audience after several generations of cultural and political change. The project will turn the campus inside-out by extending the spectacle within the performance halls into the mute public spaces between the halls and further into the surrounding streets. Projected completion date: 2008
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Jardin Botanic de Barcelona, Spain by Carlos Ferrater architects
A former rubbish tip is converted into a botanical garden. The new garden is based on botanical issues and Mediterranean ecosystems. The intervention shows the topographical and morphological conditions of the location. The grid as a basis for the ordering of phyto sections. Adapting a triangular grid to the terrain provides an irregular geometrical order for setting out the plant mosaics. With movements in elevation, the grid and the territory are facetted, dotting the vertices of the grid, a fractal structure being obtained. The order of the garden is established by interrelating mosaics and transepts. Sustainability is the basis for constructing the garden. The ground is prepared by reconstructing the topography (hillocks). The infrastructural, drainage, watering, computer, circuit and itinerary networks are rationalized. A natural space is constructed from artifice. The flora, which is ornament at first, is converted into the scientific structure of the garden.
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The Mountain Hut by ocean D
The Mountain Hut is a small scale, pre-fabricated, demountable and re-assemblable pavilion which amplifies the vast landscapes of two extreme topographical contexts � Palisades Glacial Park in northern California and, adjacent to the Machu Picchu Inca ruins in Peru.
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Colorado Springs k-12 projec tby SMHarch
Colorado Springs k-12 submission (second place) by Smith Miller Hawkinson architects.
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sugarcube_ofices by Alsop Architects and English Partnerships
Alsop explained their vision for Middlesbrough.
�Our response emerged quickly � we would create a beautiful landscape for Middlehaven � a landscape fit for the 21st century and inhabited by 21st century icons�..extraordinary objects sitting proudly in a new and extraordinary landscape. The Transporter Bridge and Riverside Stadium were taken as markers of scale and grandeur but now, next to the wide expanse of the River Tees, will sit a new generation of icons.�
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Danish Radio Concert Hall by 3XNielsen A/S
Danish Radio Concert Hall
The concert hall forms a quarter of the huge DR complex in Orestad, Copenhagen. This proposal suggests the concert hall volume to be a modulation of the masterplan grid as opposed to a contradictory monument.
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Cero 9
The Magic Mountain Competition.
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Musee des Confluences by Coop Himmelb(l)au
Crystal Cloud of Knowledge : The future society will be a society of knowledge. However this knowledge can hardly be split into clearly defined fields.
Innovations develop within interspaces, within indistinctness, within the overlapping and hybridising. Questions regarding the future will be decided within transitional fields situated between technology, biology and ethics that are the central themes of the Mus�e des Confluences. The resulting architecture is characterised by the interactions, the fusion and mutation of different entities constituting a new shape. Stimulating a direct and active use, it is not only a museum site but also a venue in town. The architecture hybridises the typology of a museum with the typology of an urban leisure space.
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Lobbi-Ports v2.0 (2002-04) by SERVO
Originally commissioned by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum for the exhibition New Hotels for Global Nomads in 2002, Lobbi-Ports has been expanded and developed in scale and detail into a second version for the 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Conceived as a system of architectural implants for infrastructural and programmatic upgrades to existing high-rise buildings, Lobbi-Ports addresses the highly transitional nature of the contemporary urban hotel lobby. The 'lobby' is by definition a complex spatial and programmatic interface and one which is in perpetual oscillation between the hotel and its host city, between an array of private as well as public forces. Lobbi-Ports v2.0 addresses this interface zone, exploring its potential as a new form of urban space. Transforming the existing curtain wall into a thickened, semi-public zone suspended between the building and the city, the lobbi-port provides a semi-temporal site for physical as well as virtual forms of social interaction, exchange, and invention.

Moving beyond the programmatic territory of a �hotel lobby,� the ports were tested with a number of potential semi-public urban programs, including temporary exhibition and event spaces to be coordinated with and co-sponsored by a variety of local cultural institutions. To this extent, Lobbi-Ports v2.0 endeavors to extend the conventional hotel�s programmatic capacity beyond the primary needs of tourism and international business, defining it as well as a host for a number of external and local cultural programs, institutions, and as a result, forms of urban mixture and invention. The physical architecture of this urban mixture, the proposal�s 'hardware,' includes new curtain wall systems which provide spatial pockets for the distribution of the 'port' elements. These exterior membranes also allow for a variety of technological upgrades to the existing building�s infrastructure, including a variety of interactive communication and lighting systems specific to the proposal�s virtual architecture.

The virtual architecture of Lobbi-Ports v2.0, its 'software,' is embedded into the physical members of the curtain wall itself. Working in collaboration with Small Design Firm, an interaction and information design studio, the curtain wall is transformed into a dynamic lighting membrane. servo considered three scenarios of visual display for this membrane: commercial advertising, public art, and the visualization of the hotel's internal programmatic activity. Small Design Firm developed a proposal for this third scenario, designing an algorithmically-controlled network of activity sensors, visual monitors, computer processing infrastructures, and the skin�s own external lighting system. The result is the formation of an artificial �brain� or communications network for the existing building, allowing it to observe its own internal programmatic activity and register the effects of that activity in the form of lighting patterns on the building�s skin.

Focusing on this integration of sensory technology and material systems, Lobbi-Ports v2.0 proposes an architecture of informed materiality. It examines the resonance between a formal, material organization and the virtual information stored within it; in this case the computational data exchange of the building�s internal programmatic activity. This real-time interaction, to the extent that it affects both material and organizational systems, is seen as a technique for continuously updating and transforming the building and its functions, thereby engendering continual aspects of exchange, invention, and mutability.
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