"The identity of a city is the product of a complex set of attributes that build up over time and serve to define it. They differentiate one city from another; they reveal who belongs and who does not. One fundamental is the constant fluctuation of speech patterns and accents, reflecting how the rules and signals of belonging shift over time."
Deyan Sudjic, The Language of Cities, 2016

One might be familiar with the replica of Hallstatt in China, or perhaps less so with one of many replicas of Venice – the one in Vienna. Opened in the Prater in May 1895, "Venedig in Wien" depicted Venice's canals and gondolas – itself following the model of "Venice in London," staged in London's Olympia Hall the year before. In a sense it was a copy of a copy, but nevertheless, the attraction is said to have popularized a saying: We're going to Venice tonight. Two copies of an architectural ensemble, put in different contexts, completely unrelated to one another but sharing a similar function – to entertain! What both share, too, is that they copy not a single building but attempt to grasp a city's identity – to capture its atmosphere.

Sometimes the reasons for architectural displacements have more to do with a sense of belonging – take the replica of Sarajevo's Sebilj in St. Louis. The Sebilj is the most iconic structure in Sarajevo's old town main square: an Ottoman-style wooden fountain, popular also as a gathering place for pigeons (even the "original," destroyed by fire in 1852, is itself an Austrian reconstruction from 1891). It's a fragment from home, built by the Bosnian community of St. Louis, a city that claims the largest Bosnian diaspora population outside Bosnia and Herzegovina itself. Here, the relationship between the built object and its specific location is deliberately severed and re-anchored elsewhere, resulting in a relationship with a different meaning.

There are, though, replicas that are less obvious: cases where cities and countries share historical, geographical, familial, or other ties among each other. Take Marienhof in Sarajevo, built in stages between 1885 and 1899 as a Musterhaus – an experimental "model" building – by the entrepreneur August Braun. As many buildings on Vienna's Ringstrasse served as role models for Sarajevo, Marienhof allegedly pairs with Baldiahof, built in parallel in Vienna. Though the two buildings are nearly identical, their meaning diverged: in Sarajevo, an architecture meant to demonstrate a material and a type became identity-bearing, introducing the city's first mixed-use model – commerce below, dwelling above – against the earlier Ottoman pattern of living in one quarter and working in another. In Vienna, it remained one palace among many. But how did the way of living in the two houses differ, and how does it still? How did layers of history and culture impact them?

Due to globalization and digital images, we now encounter architectural trends everywhere: buildings that, isolated from their surroundings, could have been anywhere, and that, precisely because of this placelessness, often fail to fit the actual needs of the city's inhabitants, or, in some cases, aren't designed with its inhabitants in mind at all.

In this studio, we will work with these two places, but not each in isolation. The focus is on the modes of translation between places and typologies: how the same typology can accommodate different types of living, and how this overlap can be read as a form of shared knowledge. Moving through these Portals we will find out what conditions and patterns shape the specific "wheres".  

This studio is linked to the Austrian Pavilion Koncesija / Konzession / Concession(e) at the 2027 Venice Biennale, curated by Adna Babahmetvić, Ajna Babahmetović, and Sebastian Höglinger.