When Niklas Bildstein Zaar learned that his architecture studio, Sub, had been hired to design the main show at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, he knew it was a strange choice. In the past decade, his Berlin-based firm has made a name for itself designing elaborate stage sets, for rappers like Travis Scott and Ye, and for Balenciaga’s buzzy fashion shows.
Along the way, the firm has helped establish an austere postindustrial visual language that has become pervasive online: apocalyptic but glossy, with dark colors and a lot of concrete. “Our palette came from worlds where some counterculture had manifested itself,” Bildstein Zaar said in an interview. “We’re working with materials that have a kind of attitude.”
On a recent visit to the firm’s studio, in the Tiergarten district of Berlin, the décor was a funereal blend of goth and high-tech. Paintings in shades of black and gray hung on the walls, and a frightening rubber mask decorated a counter. In Bildstein Zaar’s office, a sculpture of a Grim Reaper-like figure sat ominously in a corner.
For the Venice job, Sub is having to reinvent its approach for a less flashy context. The Biennale, which opens on May 10, is the world’s most prestigious architecture exhibition, and Bildstein Zaar said he hoped his firm’s experience in fashion and art would make the event appealing to a new kind of visitor. “If it managed to dress itself slightly different,” Bildstein Zaar said, “it could get a much bigger audience.”
Like its art counterpart, which took place last year, the Venice Architecture Biennale features a large-scale central exhibition, plus individual pavilions that exhibiting nations organize separately. For the main show, Sub has designed a system for presenting the exhibits, which have been selected separately by the event’s curatorial team, and for guiding visitors through the show.
The result is more pared-down than the violent indoor snowstorm or the flooded hall that Sub delivered for its Balenciaga shows: a network of reconfigurable columns covered in aluminum sheaths and with esoterically shaped pieces of 3-D aggregate. According to Sub’s design director, Sophia Kuhn, the concept is meant to reflect “natural,” “collective” and “artificial” forms of intelligence, and the display will be paired with a digital app designed by Sub that functions as an A.I.-powered personalized tour guide.
Called “Spatial Intelligens,” the app uses a learning model trained on hundreds of photos of the exhibition as well as text provided by exhibitors. It will answer visitors’ questions about the content of the show and offer suggestions on how to navigate the exhibition, depending on the visitor’s interests.
The exhibition’s curator, Carlo Ratti, said by phone that he chose Sub because its work in fashion and music had shown it “had the capacity to connect with a larger audience.” The app, he said, was an experiment that would make the show exciting to visitors who weren’t architects themselves and might otherwise struggle to parse some of the headier exhibits, which include complex architectural models and conceptual installations.
But he added that he had also been drawn to the studio’s capacity to manage complicated projects, which was especially crucial in this year’s expanded exhibition, which features 750 participants, far more than the 2023 edition.
The variety of scale of the exhibits, from the “very small” to the “very big,” made the job especially challenging, Ratti said. Designing the exhibition “was about carrying out a bottom-up analysis” of all the projects on show and drawing them together into one “big fractal organism.”
Bildstein Zaar is aware that the assignment is a new kind of challenge for the company, which he founded in 2017. A self-deprecating Swede with a penchant for black clothing, Bildstein Zaar grew up in Kiruna, a town north of the Arctic Circle that, in a dark twist, has slowly been sinking into the ground because of instability caused by a nearby mine.
“My family home is probably in a mining pit at this point,” he said. “That’s quite a metaphor, I guess.”
Sub’s early minimalist designs for Balenciaga stores and Bildstein Zaar’s work with Anne Imhof, a German artist who won the Golden Lion at the Venice Art Biennale in 2017, shared a rough, gloomy aesthetic often associated with the techno scene in Berlin, where parties often take place in repurposed industrial spaces. Kuhn, the design director, said that the city’s nightlife had been an inspiration for many of its designs.
But the studio attracted more attention after a series of provocative fashion shows for Balenciaga in which the brand was gesturing at hot-button political issues: economic inequality, pollution, geopolitical conflict.
Sub designed a set reminiscent of the European Parliament for the brand’s spring/summer 2020 show, which suggested a newfound crisis in the continent’s identity after Brexit. In a theatrical allusion to climate change at the brand’s next fall/winter show, Balenciaga and Sub oversaw the flooding of the catwalk so that the models trudged through an inch of oily water.
In an email, Demna, the mononymic fashion designer who will become Gucci’s artistic director in July after a nearly a decade at the helm of Balenciaga, described the flooded show as his most “memorable” collaboration with the studio. The cinematic drama of the show, he wrote, was “an iconic moment.”
Other projects — including the 2022 Balenciaga show in which models were pelted with fake snow, held just weeks after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine — spawned countless social media memes. Kuhn said the studio often tries to create a single “big gesture” that will translate well on apps like Instagram.
But Bildstein Zaar argued that the studio had now partly become a victim of its own success, noting that the raw, postindustrial aesthetic he had popularized with Balenciaga had led to a slew of imitators. “Some of the language that we put out there feels a bit exhausted at the moment,” Bildstein Zaar said.
The Architecture Biennale, he said, marked a shift for the studio toward a more conceptual and technology-driven approach that would be applied to future projects.
On an office computer, Christopher Blohm, the company’s digital director — dressed all in black, including leather boots with raised pyramids at the toes — demonstrated “Spatial Intelligens.” He pulled up a sleek interface where users will be able to write questions or analyze photos of the show. The app would assemble a profile of each visitor as they engage with it, Blohm explained, adding that the technology had been developed in collaboration with A.I. experts, a psychologist and philosopher.
“It can tell you what kind of person you are and how you engage with the content,” Blohm said. The goal, he said, was to use visitors’ experiences to improve the model’s suggestions over the span of the Biennale, which will run until November, that would ultimately add up to a “collective” intelligence. If nothing else, he hoped it would make even the Biennale’s most dense works accessible to everyday visitors.
“It creates a kind of fingerprint for you, based on what you’ve done, what you’re interested in,” Blohm said. As you are looking at the Biennale, he added, “it is looking back at you.”
