"The Pool" to be Australia's 2016 Venice Biennale pavilion concept

Five shortlisted proposals vied for the opportunity to design Australia's 2016 Venice Biennale national pavilion exhibition -- a token of national pride. The Australian Institute of Architects’ Venice Biennale Committee selected "The Pool" by Aileen Sage Architects and urban strategist Michelle Tabet as the winning concept.

As the newly selected Creative Directors of the pavilion, Aileen Sage and Tabet designed The Pool as a multi-sensory exhibition that profiles a series of Australia’s most remarkable pools -- from the natural to manmade, the necessary to the excessive.

Scroll down for more details about the concept.

"The Pool is a lens through which to explore Australian cultural identity. Be they natural or manmade, inland or coastal, temporary or permanent, the creative directors will invite visitors to the new DCM-designed pavilion to explore the pools of Australia in all their forms."

"The exhibition will create a pool within the new exhibition space through an immersive multi sensory experience that will transport visitors poolside. In doing so it will bring to Venice a suggestion of a particular Australian architectural condition."

"This condition will be augmented and expanded through the use of light, scent, sound, reflection and perspective to create a series of perceptual illusions."

"Within this designed landscape, a series of Australia’s most remarkable pools will be profiled. Resource, celebration, community, commemoration, leisure and lifeblood, the exhibition content will reach deep within the Australian psyche."

"From pools of necessity to the pools of excess, the pool is a key architectural device, a memory and also a setting. It has the unique ability to evoke both the sacred and the profane. It also aptly represents a distinctively Australian democratic and social space – a great leveller of difference."