Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima is the first woman to be named director of the Venice Architecture Biennale. Sejima, one half of the practice SANAA, is an exciting appointment for the 12th International Architecture Exhibition, as the last two editions were curated by professional curators and academics. Sejima, along with business partner Ryue Nishizawa, has won international acclaim for recent projects including the new Bowery home for the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, and this summer's Serpentine Gallery pavilion in London. In 2004 the team won the Biennale's Golden Lion for the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan.Venice Biennale president Paolo Baratta said of the appointment: "After a series of Biennali entrusted to eminent critics or historians, the decision was taken to give this sector once more to an architect to bring the major theme of the quality of architecture back to the forefront through a person who has made quality into a personal vocation. The choice has fallen on one of the most highly qualified and established representatives of the new masters of architecture of the new millennium."Sejima said her concept for the biennale would everything and anything and "fundamentally inclusive". "Buildings, the atmosphere that they create and the way in which they are conceived, can be the central starting point of the coming biennale," she said. "Very broadly, the process by which we design can be brought to bear on contemporary and future architectural discussion." The biennale will take place from August 29 to November 21 of next year.
