In the wake of "Avatar," filmmakers have been swept up by the urge to experiment with 3-D, and apparently this doesn't only apply to the Michael Bays of the world: at this year's Venice Architectural Biennale, weighty German director, author, and photographer Wim Wenders will debut a 3-D video installation. Titled "If Buildings Could Talk," the piece (premiering August 26) trains the "Wings of Desire" director's camera on the low undulations of the Rolex Learning Center in Switzerland, a part of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne campus.

The structure was designed by SANAA, the Tokyo-based architecture firm behind New York’s New Museum, made up of Ryue Nishizawa and Kazuyo Sejima — the latter of whom is the director of this year's architectural biennale, the first woman to fill that role. In a statement written in the form of a poem, Wenders — who last week was the recipient of a serenade at a U2 concert for his 65th birthday — describes his film with an jaunty lyricism: "If buildings could talk/ some of them would sound like Shakespeare./ Others would speak like the Financial Times" adding a few stanzas down, "don’t get me wrong: this is not a metaphor./ Buildings DO speak to us!"

This is not Wenders’s only venture into 3-D filmmaking, as he has also been working on a tribute to choreographer Pina Bausch, who died during preproduction earlierthis summer only five days after having been diagnosed with cancer.