This year’s 14th Venice Architecture Biennale, which closed yesterday, was the most controversial architecture iteration of the festival in recent memory — and the most popular, according to statistics released by the Biennale over the weekend. A record number of visitors made their way through the Giardini and Arsenale from June 7 through November 23: 228,000 according to a statement released by the exhibition.
The expanded audience comes in response both to director Rem Koolhaas’s monumental presence in contemporary architectural discourse, but also to this year’s expanded length. In previous years, the Architecture Biennale only ran for three months; Koolhaas doubled that to six months, making 2014 the first year that the architecture display and art display have had equal run times.
