Germany’s contribution to the 14th Biennale of Architecture in Venice, curated by the commissioners Alex Lehnerer and Savvas Ciriacidis, is the point of departure for this issue of ARCH+. “Bungalow Germania,” as their installation in the German Pavilion is called, comprises a life-sized replica of select rooms and features of the Kanzlerbungalow [Chancellor’s Bungalow], that modest, inscrutable glass building in Bonn that Sep Ruf designed for West German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard in 1964. Upon first encounter, Lehnerer and Ciriacidis’ installation might appear as nothing more than an intervention into the space of the German Pavilion, which was significantly remodeled under National Socialism. Further consideration of their work, however, raises a number of important questions about architecture and about how field conceives of itself. In grappling with these questions in this issue, two thematic rubrics emerged: the architecture of power, and the power of architecture.

The installation in the German Pavilion—a physical juxtaposition of two diametrically opposed moments in the history of representational German architecture—offers a uniquely productive opportunity to consider the question of architecture’s agency. This issue of ARCH+ approaches the topic from a variety of angles, broaching, for example, the contemporary debates surrounding the philsophical movement known as “New Realism,” and delineating the movement’s protracted entanglement with architecture.

The chair is guest editor of this issue.

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