Kazuyo Sejima’s Rolex Learning Centre in Lausanne

This year’s Architecture biennale in Venice is a chance for Rolex to highlight its own reputation for a dazzling architectural language, says Caragh McKay

Curator Rem Koolhaas has gone back to basics for the 14th International Architecture Exhibition (IAE), which opens at the Venice Biennale this month: “Several architecture Biennales have been dedicated to the celebration of the contemporary. This year’s exhibition – “Fundamentals” – will look at histories, attempt to reconstruct how architecture finds itself in its current situation and speculate on its future,” says the Dutch architect of his approach.

It’s a fitting theme for Rolex, which has just announced a three-year partnership of the IAE and collaboration with Daniel Libeskind, whose return to the Biennale, 30 years after he won 1985’s Golden Lion Prize, is much anticipated. Libeskind will design the Rolex Venice Pavilion, and has announced hisSonnets in Babylon installation using drawings and poetry to question the future of the built environment. “This time I am telling the story through my drawings, exploring the tension between the city and the imagination.”

Lititz Watch Technicum school in Pennsylvania by Michael Graves

Libeskind has an ongoing association with Rolex, as a member of the advisory board on its Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. But the Biennale also serves to highlight the Swiss watch marque’s own dedication to modern architecture over the past 40 years. Rolex was well ahead of the curve when, in 1961, it inaugurated a programme of building corporate spaces with a futuristic bent. They commissioned the Swiss firm Addor, Julliard & Bolliger to erect a new HQ that would relocate its business from Geneva Old Town into the suitably industrial environs of the Praille-Acacias district.

The watchmaker’s approach was visionary from the off: that building in Acacias was primarily a means of accommodating the watchmaker’s rapidly developing production needs but it always meant to be more than just a totemic structure. Conceived from the inside out, not only did this architectural philosophy mirror the engineering upon which the brand’s watch business was built, it was designed to be comfortable to work in; a space to delight and inspire its employees as much as onlookers and visitors....Continue Reading

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