How do buildings talk? Embodied experience in the Rolex Learning Centre

The Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010, curated by Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima, co-founder of Tokyo-based practice SANAA, included a remarkable twenty-four-minute 3D film the German director Wim Wenders depicting practice’s Rolex Learning Centre Switzerland. Entitled If Buildings Could Talk , ran continuous loop, without tangible beginning or end, much like building itself. Invited SANAA to develop film, found himself confronted with new type space that he had no prior experience of, and vocabulary describe: ‘The Centre’, said during talk given at Biennale, ‘is more landscape than building.’