The Pavilion of the Republic of Korea stands in the Biennale Gardens, in the Castello district.

Built in 1995 to a joint design by the Korean architect Kim Seok-chul and the Italian Franco Mancuso, it was the last permanent pavilion erected in the Gardens.

Its irregular form, in glass and steel, arose from a constraint turned into a principle. In order not to fell the existing trees or disturb their roots, the building was raised on small pilotis and shaped around the vegetation, also incorporating a pre-existing brick structure.

At the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, coinciding with the building's thirtieth anniversary, the pavilion presented "Little Toad, Little Toad: Unbuilding Pavilion", commissioned by the Arts Council Korea and curated by the Curating Architecture Collective (Dahyoung Chung, Heejung Kim, Sungkyu Jung).

The title comes from a Korean nursery rhyme in which a toad exchanges its old house for a new one. The exhibition, however, reversed the logic of substitution, choosing to rethink the existing building rather than imagine its demolition.

Four installations by Korean architects and artists reinterpreted different parts of it.

The most visible intervention was on the roof: "New Voyage" by Kim Hyunjong transformed the roof a space originally intended as an exhibition terrace but left virtually unused for thirty years due to structural limitations into an accessible observatory facing the lagoon and the Adriatic.

The structure, in polished stainless steel that reflects and absorbs its surroundings, was fitted with taut sails recalling a ship's rigging an image of the maritime ties between Venice and Korea and, at the same time, of the "new course" wished for the pavilion.