《UNRAVELING: NEW SPACES 》

Have you ever imagined wool as a building material? Familiar in its softness and versatility, wool rarely makes its way into the realm of architecture. Yet at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, the Serbian Pavilion boldly subverts that norm. Titled UNRAVELING: NEW SPACES, the project is curated by architect Slobodan Jović and developed by an interdisciplinary team including Davor Ereš, Jelena Mitrović, Igor Pantić, Sonja Krstić, Ivana Najdanović, and Petar Laušević. Their collective effort challenges conventional notions of architecture by embracing a material that is fluid, reversible, and impermanent.

Rooted in Serbian traditions of craftsmanship, the pavilion is constructed entirely from wool—a nod to the country’s rich legacy of textile arts. By transforming this ancestral medium into an architectural language, the installation opens a dialogue between cultural identity and contemporary spatial practice. Rather than producing a static structure, the team has conceived a fully cyclical installation—one that gradually weaves and unweaves itself over time, guided by algorithmic precision. From the opening day of the Biennale, the wool begins a slow transformation, unraveling itself until it ultimately returns to its raw form by the exhibition’s end. 

No waste is generated. All materials are returned to their original state—spools of yarn—reaffirming the installation’s core ethos of material care, reversibility, and ecological consciousness. This reversible process invites visitors to reflect not only on the impermanence but also the mutability of architecture—its ability to evolve, dissolve, and begin again. Suspended from the ceiling, wool panels measuring 1.2 x 5 meters cascade like soft chains, forming a textile landscape in constant flux. Solar-powered micro-motors guide the yarn’s descent, subtly shifting the pavilion’s volume through sagging, loosening, and deformation. As light filters through the central oculus above, the translucent layers of wool reveal a mesmerizing interplay of density, softness, and transparency.

Visitors encounter an ever-evolving space—its form never quite the same from one moment to the next. Over the course of six months, what was once an immersive spatial volume dissolves back into a bundle of thread, completing a perfect material loop. This act of deconstruction becomes a poetic metaphor, calling into question the conventional life cycle of buildings and materials. UNRAVELING is more than an installation—it is an interdisciplinary investigation into the ways we build and the values we uphold. Merging Serbian textile traditions with cutting-edge research, the project addresses temporality, material scarcity, and circularity in a time of global precarity. Wool, in its slow unmaking, becomes a living architectural agent—demonstrating that architecture can be tactile, adaptive, and regenerative.

Aligning with Biennale curator Carlo Ratti’s emphasis on collective intelligence and architectural humility, the Serbian Pavilion advocates for a softer, more relational model of architectural practice. In a world shaped by accelerating environmental and social crises, the installation offers an alternative vocabulary—one that bridges tradition and innovation, material and immaterial, permanence and ephemerality. This transgenerational and cross-disciplinary collaboration—spanning architecture, fashion, energy systems, and digital technologies—proposes a new paradigm: relational architecture grounded in care, tradition, and shared authorship. Through a convergence of expertise across disciplines, the project gestures toward a future in which architecture is not merely constructed, but grown, unspooled, and remembered.

The Serbian Pavilion at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale

Instagram | @unraveling.rs

Design Studio | The Serbian Pavilion Curatorial Team

Principal Designers | Davor Ereš, Jelena Mitrović, Igor Pantić, Sonja Krstić, Ivana Najdanović, Petar Laušević

Location | Giardini della Biennale, Venice, Italy

Photography | ReportArch / Andrea Ferro @reportarch @andreaferrophotography

➤ Image by ReportArch / Andrea Ferro