T/C LATVIJA

One, two, three and you're free. This simple rhyme from childhood helps to remind us how creative and free we are in our thinking and worldview as we are growing up.

When we are grown, however, more and more questions tend to arise: Why? How? What? Who?We begin to perceive and analyze the world and its processes in increasingly complex ways. We need explanation after explanation, reference after reference, attribution after attribution. But where does that leave cognition, curiosity and the desire to delve deeper? We seem to be getting ever more slapdash as we rely on finding the right answers and pointers at every turn – answers that someone else has produced. But to find out if they are the right ones, we have to check again whether our references are correct.

T/C Latvia is a self-educating and entertaining supermarket offering 506 serious architectural ideas, organized in corresponding sections, where each section is one of Biennials, starting with 2002, when Latvia participated for the first time in the international Venice Architecture Biennale.

So far, everything seems fine and good, yet the working process itself demonstrated that our view of the supermarket was too simplistic. The supermarket is undeniably subject to stereotypes and is most often associated with the cult of consumption. However, this is not the full story. We are now forced to look at it from a completely different perspective, and for each one of us, the supermarket already means something different. And if our view of the supermarket is simplistic, how can we be sure that it is also not the case with architecture?

Below, a free paragraph for your thoughts:

The concept of the Laboratory of the Future is an integral part of T/C Latvia. But what is a laboratory? A laboratory is a specially equipped room for conducting chemical analysis, various scientific studies or experiments. We are very far from being chemists, but T/C Latvia is a creative experiment for the future. And what is the future? The future is a part of the axis of time: a set of events that have not yet happened, but will happen, and follow the present.

So, we don't have an answer to the question of what the outcome will be, because it is the laboratory of the future, or a set of experiments yet to take place. An experiment is not possible without experimenters. And that means that the outcome will not be determined by our wishes or expectations, but by the actions and attitudes of each experimenter towards the opportunity to make their own choices, to observe, and to look; to be active and participate or to be curious and interested to the end.

Do you know what kind of participant in this experiment you will be? Is T/C Latvia about architecture? The answer is yes, it's about architecture - more than than ever so. That's 506 architectural ideas available in one place. They can be selected and combined to create new ideas. But they can also be taken and used one by one in practical life.

The answers to the questions are ready, what to do with them is up to each individual. Only the way of getting the answers is simplified. When the future-maker enters the supermarket, they find themself in a safe and familiar environment in which it is natural to make choices. However, it’s key to remember that to achieve the goal one must be interested, curious, and dig deeper.