An architecture biennale can be more than a place to simply represent and celebrate the status quo in architectural production. The Biennale’s state of exception and its spatial distance from the location from where people normally work open up a space for examining and critically questioning the conditions of everyday work and production. Although, technologically speaking, more is possible today than ever before, in recent years architects’ creative latitude has been greatly reined in by an enormous – and growing – burden of rules and regulations. Against this background, the architectural exhibition is becoming an ever more relevant medium for critical and experimental practice of architecture. The fact of the exhibition space’s autonomy, and its distance from the everyday world of public and private architecture, has a potential as a base for autonomous thinking and acting that is increasingly being recognised and put to use. In this case autonomy is not to be understood as the self-referential l’art pour l’art, but as a protected space for deviance, a prerequisite for the success of new forms of sociability in a highly technologicalized world of such complexity that no one can have a sole overview anymore. This is where the project «Incidental Space» by the architect Christian Kerez enters in: It is intended as fundamental research. As part of the Swiss contribution to the Biennale Architettura 2016, its aim is to investigate the possibilities – both in technical feasibility and the limits of our own imagination – of how to think, build and experience architecture differently.