The international exhibition held in Venice every second year, known as the Venice Biennale is the most important foreign event of Hungarian architecture. The Art Nouveau style pavilon planned by Géza Maróti is one of the oldest buildings of Giardini, the area that hosts the event: last year was the pavilon's 100th anniversary. In the majority of this time the building gave place to exhibitions of fine and applied arts, since the Biennale itself only gained importance in the nineties. The forthcoming event will be the twelfth.
The displays of Hungarian architecture were so far accompanied by fierce debates at home and thick silence abroad. One of the more successful examples was the 1996 exhibition of Gábor Bachman, currently working in China. The event brought international popularity to the architect unrecognized in Hungary. Other such examples were the 2002 exhibition displaying the work of the three famous Hungarian masters (István Ferencz, Tamás Nagy and Gábor Turányi), and Re:orient, dealing with the situation of the Chinese minority in Hungary. The latter received positive criticism both in Hungary and abroad. Corpora-project, a Hungarian-Japanese exhibit of the previous Biennale in 2008 was based on virtual techniques and computer programming. It also referred to the question „whether current tendencies in Hungarian architecture allow us to claim international professional recognition.”
