Posts Tagged Venice Biennale
David Chipperfield to curate 2012 Venice Biennale
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 17, 2011
The designer of the Turner Contemporary in Margate will be the first British architect to curate the event
David Chipperfield is to curate the world's largest architecture exhibition, the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale.
When his appointment is officially announced, the British architect – renowned for his cool, clear almost chaste designs, most notably his recent Turner Contemporary in Margate and the Hepworth Wakefield in Yorkshire – will have just eight months to come up with a theme for two huge group shows: one in the former rope works of the Arsenale; the other in the nearby Giardini.
The decision, reported in Building Design, was welcomed by Alex de Rijke, new dean of architecture at the RCA. "Someone of his intellectual calibre will rise to the challenge," he said. "He's not going to use it as an opportunity to promote his own architecture. He is going to frame an issue, treat it as research and ask people to contribute."
Chipperfield, who will be the first British architect to curate the event, emerged as the preferred choice some months ago, but is understood to have been reluctant to take on the role because of concerns over the proposed appointment of Giulio Malgara, a food importer and friend of Silvio Berlusconi, as the biennale's director.
Malgara's appointment was announced last month. He would have replaced the current director Paolo Baratta but, following Berlusconi's decision to stand down as prime minister, it now seems certain that Malgara will not take up the post. Baratta will continue as director.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 11, 2011
Architects reach for their comic books, David Chipperfield sets his sights on Venice, and the people of St Leonards-on-Sea get very excited about a diving board
Is the recession causing escapist fantasies in architects? It seems so. This week sees the publication online of the first instalment of Looking for Spinoza: A Shooting Bad Guys Saga. This dark, retro-style comic book by Franco Falconetto is especially enjoyable for lovers of architecture, with its detailed and rather beautiful chiaroscuro studies of Italian baroque churches and piazzas appearing as stage sets for knife-fights and shoot-outs between heroes and villains.
I hear a rumour that Falconetto is none other than Francis Terry, of classical architects Quinlan & Francis Terry. Own up, Terry. "Yes, these are my drawings," he confesses. "Originally, I started them to amuse the children, but it fast became a way of amusing myself." Explain yourself, buster, I snarl. "Architects are natural comic-book writers," says Terry, singing like a canary. "It uses the same skills of imagining people in spaces in different scenarios."
Terry clearly has a second career ahead of him, as an author and illustrator of knowing pulp fiction. So, too, has Peter Murray, former editor of the RIBA Journal and co-founder of Blueprint magazine. Murray calls A Passion to Build, his online novel, "a racy tale of two architects, Harry Jamb and Frederick Shaw, who start out in practice together but, after an acrimonious 'divorce', compete furiously". The denouement is set in the distressed fictional city of Frampton-on-Tees, a coded reference to architect and historian Kenneth Frampton, where the architects slug it out "in the competition to design the buildings for the Olympic-style EuroGames". Plot and sub-plot race along "watched and reported on by the sexually voracious Rachael Dove, architectural correspondent of the Gazette". Blimey. The book will be online next week at Clip-kit.com.
Murray's tongue may well be firmly in his cheek, yet he is following in a literary tradition that portrays fictional architects as egotistical, over-ambitious and perhaps even insane monsters. Think of Howard Roark, hero of Ayn Rand's blockbuster novel The Fountainhead (more than 6.5m copies sold since first published in 1943). Roark, played by Gary Cooper in the gloriously OTT film of the book, dynamites one of his own buildings after second-rate talents are brought in to complete it without him.
Then there's Malestrazza, the villainous architect in Serge Brussolo's novel Les Emmurés, who concretes his victims into the walls of a very disturbing building. In 2009, it was made into a straight-to-DVD horror starring Mischa Barton, AKA Marissa from The OC.
Venice is an architectural opera. And a soap opera, too. There were fears that Silvio Berlusconi was about to push Paolo Baratta from his role as director of the Venice Biennale in favour of his business buddy Giulio Malgara. Britain's David Chipperfield, apparently, didn't want to curate the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale if Malgara was in charge. Now, with the playboy Italian PM out and Baratta likely to stay, Chipperfield will curate the show, the most glamorous in the international architecture calendar. To date, Chipperfield's work in Venice has been for a renovation and extension to the city's San Michele cemetery. Death in Venice, you might say. He will have to think of something more life-enhancing for next year. And prontissimo too.
Ole Scheeren, former partner of Rem Koolhaas at OMA and project architect of the cinematic CCTV building in Beijing, this week revealed his design for the 268-metre Angkasa Raya tower to be built alongside the Petronas twin towers in Kuala Lumpur, for Malaysian developers Sunrise Berhard. Images show a theatrical building Hollywood directors might well thrill to, with its air of Metropolis, Things to Come and The Fountainhead, in a tropical setting. The moody photograph of the architect that accompanies the press release is gloriously noir. Or possibly pulp fiction.
Finally, Quixotic Architecture has been commissioned by a group of local business people to design a new lido for St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex. With views to the cliffs of Beachy Head, the proposed Lido, currently in the planning stage, is to be clustered around and below a homage to the original diving platform designed by Sidney Little. Striking, sunny images of the project evoke a world of 1930s design and seaside bathing, all brought happily up to date – architectural escapism at its sunniest.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 14, 2011
Big Ben is becoming the leaning tower of London, but architects the world over have begun deliberately tilting towers, from the Capital Gate in Abu Dhabi to Anish Kapoor's Olympic Orbit
News that Big Ben or, more properly, St Stephen's Tower, is leaning is not exactly surprising. Battered by the elements and undermined by human intervention – the digging of sewers, railways, roads and underground car parks all around them, as well as the effects of war and earthquakes – it seems remarkable that so many towers around the world stand ramrod straight. Some, like the famous campanile at Pisa Cathedral have leaned since they were new. Others, like the church towers of Venice, have leant gradually over the centuries, as the artificial structure of the islands they rise from rots and buckles.
What has changed in the past few years is the fact that architects are designing towers that lean deliberately. RMJM – a long established British practice – has just completed a 35-storey tower, the Capital Gate in Abu Dhabi, that, said the architects when it was commissioned, "is intended to lean 18 degrees westwards, more than four times that of the world famous leaning tower of Pisa". And it does. This angle of lean has secured the eyecatching tower a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the "World's Furthest Leaning Manmade Tower."
The root of this leaning architecture can be found in the mesmerising, although unbuilt, 400-metre high Monument to the Third International designed by Vladimir Tatlin shortly after the Bolshevik revolution. It was to have leant over Petrograd (later Leningrad and now St Petersburg) at the same angle as the Earth's tilt: 23.5 degrees. Inside its double-helix steel frame, three great chambers – a cube, a pyramid and a cylinder – would have revolved, in turn, yearly, monthly and daily. Appropriately, the "daily" cylinder was to have housed a newspaper. The tower has haunted dreams of architects and engineers ever since: a 10-metre replica has just been completed by the team at Dixon Jones in the courtyard of the Royal Academy of Arts as part of the exhibition, Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-35 that opens on 29 October.
"It's been a huge challenge, but what a pleasure creating an interpretation of something you so admire", designer Jeremy Dixon tells me. "It's been rather like interpreting a piece of music where you have to fill in the gaps with imagination and whatever skill you have."
Meanwhile, the leaning, looping structure of the ArcelorMittall Orbit at the London Olympics Games 2012 site is very nearly finished, but the big day of completion turns on the weather: high winds have prevented engineers from putting the last piece in place. What is clear is that this extraordinary 115m red tower, designed by Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond, and realised in co-operation with Arup and Kathryn Findlay Architects, owes much to Tatlin's tower.
Britain will be home in years to come to thousands of almost invisible new towers if the winning entry of the competition for the design of a new national standard electricity pylon is put into production. This is the T-Pylon by the Copenhagen firm Bystrup Arkitekter og Designere.
The judges of the competition held by the National Grid, the Department of Energy and Climate Change and RIBA agreed unanimously that T-Pylon would work best and make the least impact on the landscape. It would be two-thirds the height of current standard British pylons, although National Grid engineers will work closely with the architects before a new version is allowed to march across the country.
In Scotland, a tower that disappeared 18 years ago might just rise again. This was the 90-ft campanile of St Bride's, East Kilbride in the diocese of Motherwell, one of a large number of Catholic churches built from the late 1950s in new towns and areas of new mass housing. A daunting design – its power station-like exterior houses a magnificent daylit interior – St Bride's was designed by Gillespie Kidd & Coia (architects of the internationally famous modern ruin, Cardross Seminary), and consecrated in 1964. The campanile neither leaned nor swayed, but was demolished to keep maintenance costs of this vast church to a minimum. Now the Paul Stallan Studio, part of RMJM, has been asked to restore St Bride's. We can only pray that the campanile will be rebuilt. Without it, the church has been like a headless statue of a saint vandalised by passing iconoclasts.
Back to Earth, or Venice, with a bump. Silvio Berlusconi is trying to replace Paolo Baratta, head of the Venice Biennale, with his friend Giulio Malgara, a 73-year-old businessman whose greatest cultural achievement to date is bringing Gatorade to Italy. The Italian government is expected to approve the appointment.
Baratta has done much to raise the profile of the Architecture Biennale. According to Ricky Burdett, director of the 2006 Architecture Biennale, speaking to Building Design magazine, "In the Italian system, individuals make a big difference, and this will be a serious loss. It is sad and depressing to see that local politics has once again won the day in a country that has so much to offer. The Italian government should reconsider this flawed appointment. But with teenage sex scandals and a banking crisis occupying politicians' minds, I doubt anybody is listening."
Writing in the Architect, the journal of the American Institute of Architects, Aaron Betsky, director of the 2008 Architecture Biennale, says: "My contacts tell me that the outrage this move by Berlusconi has produced is so intense that what is usually a routine procedure validating the prime minister's choice might offer chances for reversal." Mind you, Betsky's Biennale offered the very kind of spectacle that might well have triggered Mr Berlusconi's sudden interest in the Biennale. Ding Dong, as Big Ben might say.
Gothic: a thoroughly modern art form
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 10, 2011
From Venice's spooky pavilions to the ICA's talks on terror, the shadows of this 18th-century art form are creeping up everywhere
Gothic is the original modern art style. In 18th-century Britain, a market was born in both fiction and art – including printed, popular art by the likes of Hogarth and Gillray, and one of the strangest fruits of this new consumable middle-class culture was a vogue for medievalist horror. From novels such as The Monk to whimsical architectural creations such as Sir John Soane's Museum, the gothic revelled in the macabre, delighted in the depraved, and (here lies its modernity) treated art itself as a kind of fictional construct, a labyrinthine realm of mental play.
The quintessential gothic creation is, for me, the Monk's Parlour in Soane's Museum, where eerie filtered light, sepulchral shadows and a skull create the perfect mood for reading tales of terror. Here reading is imagined as an escape, and the architecture mirrors the liberty of the reader: by implication, a perfect library might be full of rooms designed for different genres of fiction (a Jane Austen room, done out like a Bath drawing room, perhaps?).
Gothic, which in the 18th-century was so self-conscious, and so liberating for the modern mind (it is no coincidence that it was contemporary with the French Revolution), is being revived again in art. If you look around the best art of today, exquisite gothic shadows are everywhere. One of the most memorable moments in Mike Nelson's fantastic warren of invented rooms at the 54th Venice Biennale is when you climb a rickety staircase into a low domed chamber pervaded by yellow light: this spooky glow is created by a coloured skylight, and the effect is identical to the way Soane used such colour filters in his otherworldly museum-house and his Dulwich mausoleum.
Nelson's use of fictional architecture to tell stories and beguile the imagination is pure Soanean gothic. Yet Nelson is not the only gothic artist in Venice. The German Pavilion is as scary as hell, with its perverse paraphernalia of religion turned bad and an artist who knew he was dying when he took on the commission, and as for a man who is a human candle ... how gothic is that?
The ICA, as it happens, is exploring the new gothic in art and culture in a weekend of talks and events called Template for Terror. I will be in a panel discussion about gothic art there on Sunday, and if I were not already convinced that an 18th-century notion offers insights into the art of today, Mike Nelson's weird light makes it seem that gothic is indeed the art term of the moment.
Venice Architecture Biennale: castles in the air
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 14, 2010
From barely there buildings to ethereal cloud walks, the Venice Biennale is where architects go to dream
Riding the interminably slow accelerato waterbus to the Venice Architecture Biennale gave me time to stare afresh at the rows of theatrical houses and palaces on parade along the banks of the Grand Canal. If, in your mind's eye, you strip away the flamboyant gothic and Renaissance facades, you are left with rows of four-square brick boxes with big chimneys sitting by the water's edge under the vast skies, which did so much to make Turner's reputation as a visionary artist when he painted them. What you have, then, is a city that represent the four elements: earth (bricks), air (sky), fire (chimneys) and water (canal).
Unconsciously, this was more or less the theme of the 2010 Biennale. In an era of financial paucity and increasing concerns about the sensational waste of our capitalist world, its ever bigger buildings and ever more sprawling cities, I had the feeling that many architects from around the world are trying to get back to basics. Not, that is, to lead us into some austere era of rudimentary design and construction, but to help us think of how we can truly do more with less.
The biennale has been curated by Kazuyo Sejima, one half of the Pritzker prize-winning Japanese practice Sanaa. Given that Sanaa specialise in a form of architecture that might be called ethereal – buildings of great transparency, such as the new Rolex Learning Centre in Lausanne, that touch the ground as lightly as possible – this idea of doing more with less, and delightfully so, makes sense. Sejima has named this year's exhibition People Meet in Architecture, which, of course, they do. Yet she seems to be asking what this architecture might be if only it weren't such a slave, as it is at the moment, to overwhelming commercial forces.
The 12th International Architecture exhibition (the first was held in 1980) is a panoramic snapshot showing what architects around the world are thinking beyond and aside from the everyday concerns they have with satisfying clients and wooing planning committees. Held in the Arsenale – the one-time hub of the imperial Venetian navy – and the formal exhibition gardens overlooking the lagoon five minutes' walk away, the Biennale aims to encourage fresh thinking about architecture at a time of economic restraint, environmental fears and yet limitless opportunities. Here, in the dreamiest of all cities, is a rare chance for architects to dream and play, as well as address matter-of-fact issues of how we should be building at the moment. As Sejima said at the opening of the show, "an architecture exhibition is a challenging concept, as actual buildings cannot be exhibited". She continued: "As an architect, I feel it's a part of our profession to use space as a medium to express our thoughts. In this way, the atmosphere of the exhibition will be reached through multiple viewpoints rather than through a single orientation. It's a backdrop for people to relate to architecture, for architecture to relate to people, and for people to relate to themselves."
As if to underline this theme, when I walked into the massive Corderie, the old ropeworks buildings of the Arsenale – where one half of the sprawling biennial exhibition is on show – a team of Japanese architects was busy building a house that was barely there.
They were, they said, "thinking of architecture in the air", whereby "even the structures that give a building its very shape may no longer be clear but, rather, voidlike". I see. Or, rather, I didn't, as the house Junya Ishigami and his colleagues were building is made of what appears to be the finest steel threads. Design drawings of the house on the walls of the ropeworks were so fine as to be all but impossible to interpret. It was as if these diligent architects were building one of Italo Calvino's invisible cities, shaping a structure that might or might not be real.
The fantastical cities which Calvino imagined in Invisible Cities were a homage to Venice itself; the least likely of all cities, fictional or real. Ishigami's installation, Architecture as Air, is a riposte to the idea of building ourselves into a hell of our own making. I like the fact that this house has precise measurements – 14 x 4 x 4 metres – as if it might be built for real, and that it has a structure comprising columns, beams and bracing. Yet these are "indeterminate contours lacking true physical form that dissolve into the transparent space rather than structures supporting the building". At one point, it all threatened to fall down.
Next door is an installation called Cloudscapes by Tetsuo Kondo Architects and Matthias Schuler of Transsolar Klima Engineering. Here, visitors walk up the most delicate steel ramps into artificially generated clouds. This has been done before – notably on the banks of Lake Neuchâtel during the 2002 Swiss Expo by the New York architects Diller + Scofidio – yet there is something delightfully otherworldly in walking with your head in the clouds inside a building. All that is solid melts into water vapour, while architectural preconceptions fumble into a foggy state of indeterminancy. Anything might go.
As if to address this feeling, in another room in the Corderie Serpentine Gallery, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has installed a plethora of video screens on which you can sit and watch and listen to ideas about the future from all the Biennale's participants. Or, you can simply gawp at the scintillating, stroboscopic beauty of the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson's Your Split Second House, a cavernous, dark space in which whip-cracks and writhing snakes of water flash in front of your eyes, hinting at thrilling structures that could never really be, and are gone before your eyes even begin to adjust to their uncertain forms.
These installations – clouds, invisible houses, ephemeral structures – are, I think, successful. Whatever practical relevance they have on the future of what we build is not really their point; they are things of beauty, or ways of making us see with wide-open eyes. What might architecture, and the spaces it shapes and cossets, be like if we could only think about it freely?
A team of Spanish architects, engineers and musicians led by Antón García-Abril and Ensamble Studio suggest it's all a matter of balance; to this effect, they have installed two enormous interecting concrete I-beams across an entire room of the Corderie. These appear to be held in check by a rock and a coil spring, suggesting that the line we walk between self-destruction and a positive future is both delicate and dramatic.
In recent Biennales, curators have been been unable to resist the temptation to create exhibition rooms that feel more like the inside of dense academic tomes (indigestible in the Venetian heat) than installations with immediate visual impact. This year, the idea of creating strong yet simple themes and messages has been carried through from the Arsenale to the Giardini, the public park overlooking the lagoon and the lido, well away from the crowds of St Mark's Square.
This is where many of the national pavilions are found, waving flags for the architectural thinking of countries that have been involved with cultural events in Venice for many decades. Those with a more youthful involvement, whether Croatia or Bahrain, Chile or Korea, peddle their cultural wares in the Arsenale.
The Biennale's Golden Lion award for the best national pavilion has been presented to the Kingdom of Bahrain for a display of three simple fishermen's huts uprooted from the coast of Bahrain for the duration of the Venice show. Entitled Reclaim and curated by architects Noura Al-Sayeh and Fuad Al-Ansari, this is a touching display of a vernacular culture fast disappearing in a part of the world where architectural bombast rules. These shacks are elemental and beautiful.
In the spirit of austerity, the Belgian pavilion shows bits and pieces of the fabric of heavily used office buildings to highlight the notion of durability and the nature of wear and tear. So, stretches of rubber-studded floor vie for attention with worn painted steel handrails. It's rather moving: all those Belgian feet and hands making their imprint on the bulky architecture of the often unlovely contemporary office.
The Dutch present models of empty buildings highlighting the gormless enormity of architectural waste; how we concrete over anywhere we can for short-term gain, while governments prattle on about sustainability and building shortages.
The Hungarian pavilion is a maze of bright yellow school pencils hanging from ceilings by cotton threads. The idea, backed up by touching videos showing architects' hands – young and old – drawing, made the simple point that, although it's undeniably clever, computer-aided design in architecture has done little to make us happier or more human. Drawing remains the guiding genius of buildings that touch us.
"What makes a livable city?" ask the Danes. Behind a yellow banner posing this perennial question sits a Carlsberg dispensing machine that, I suppose, answers the question, especially in a Venice that has been as hot and sticky as molten glue this summer. Inside their pavilion, though, the Danes have new plans for Copenhagen. While these portray happy consumers in baseball caps and high-five-style poses in front of jaw-jutting buildings you hope will never get planning permission, it's easy to see that the city-by-the-water presented here is a kind of would-be Venice, seen through computer screens and digital processes, darkly. If only, the Danes seem to be saying, we could have the excess of our contemporary world in cities as magical as Venice.
Flower cities and giant tigers
The Finns ask us to "stay with the elements" and "close to nature"; the Austrians clearly want us to retain something of the innocence of childhood with models of a city centre, one made of flowers, another straddled by a centrepiece building in the guise of a tiger. The British presentation, curated by Vicky Richardson of the British Council and London architects muf, is more obscure. Its professed hope – that we will learn to respect natural Venice as much as we have drawn from its culture and architecture in the past – is represented by, among other things, excepts from Ruskin's The Stones of Venice and a wooden model of the Olympic stadium currently being built in London.
Much of this Biennale is thoughtful, even wistful stuff, the concerns of generations faced with the absurd contradiction of a desire, on the part of a minority of humans, to lead a "good" life, and the reality of the many grasping for the very cities, buildings and consumer trash that will bring us all to a hot and sticky end.
With a light yet distinctive touch, Kazuyo Sejima has done well to shape an event that raises such issues while still delighting us with installations that hint at something soulful and magical beyond the humourless world of "urban regeneration" and architectural inanity. She brings us back to the elemental in architecture, and finally to the elements themselves.
• This article was amended on 1 September 2010. The original incorrectly described Italo Calvino as a Venetian. This has been deleted.
Venice Architecture Biennale 2010 | Architecture review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 4, 2010
From shimmering water sprays to a walk in the clouds, this year's biennale is a delight, thanks to the inspired curatorship of Kazuyo Sejima
The Venice Architecture Biennale is the world's greatest festival of the art, a grand global expo of beauty, pretension and silliness. Its three-day vernissage is a mighty schmoozefest of architectural clans, eased by a diet of bellinis and dinners on rooftop terraces. The vernissage, in truth, usually seems the point of the thing, rather than the three succeeding months when the humble paying punters can see the exhibition for themselves.
Architects, you might think, should know something about making pleasurable spaces. It's their job. Yet the paradox of the biennale is that, bellinis apart, it is usually a physically awful experience. You are battered with strident images and turgid texts, and your vital forces drain into countless flickering screens. The Corderie dell'Arsenale, the 300m-long former ropeworks where a large chunk of the biennale is shown, becomes an exhausting slog through mounds of ego and assertion.
One of the good things about this year's biennale, the 12th, is that it is delightful. It alerts the senses and the mind. It has life. The content of the Corderie has presence, but is not too densely packed, and skilfully mixes up heavy and light, light and dark, cool and warm, image and object. You come early to giant beams installed by the Spanish architect Antón García-Abril, precariously balanced. Later a light metal bridge takes you on a looping journey up into an artificial cloud. An Olafur Eliasson installation of water sprays, momentarily arrested by flickering lights, is relief from the sweltering summer heat. There is another installation of delicate steel threads, so delicate indeed that an unfortunate accident with a spectator left it in need of restoration. Then there is a room with photographs of the Iranian city of Isfahan, simply presented, and another with finely crafted drawings of some fairly humble buildings. There is another room packed with talking heads, examples of the 2,000 hours of interviews that the art curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist has carried out in his life. Here you can get your ordeal-by-screen over with, once and for all.
The delightfulness of the biennale has something to do with the fact that it is, unusually, directed by a practising architect, and a good one. She is also the first female director. She is Kazuyo Sejima, one half of the Tokyo-based practice Sanaa, whose works include the recent Rolex learning centre in Lausanne.
The director's job is to set a theme, and decide the content of the Corderie and of a large building called the International pavilion. Individual countries then present their own shows, more-or-less following the theme. Bigger, more established countries show these in purpose-built pavilions in the biennale gardens. Others, including Ireland and Singapore, find locations elsewhere in Venice.
The theme is tricky, as it has to be both wide-ranging and focused. Usually directors settle for titles that can mean almost anything or, as in 2004's "Metamorph", nothing at all. Once it was "Less Aesthetics, More Ethics" and turned out to be the precise opposite. Sejima chose "People Meet in Architecture". It sounds a bit soggy, and also guilty of architects' common pretence that they are not obsessed with buildings when, in fact, they always are. But its vagueness allows her to exercise her impeccable judgment in selecting exhibitors, while also creating an overall experience in which architecture is the main but not the only ingredient. There is also art, film and, indeed, people.
So her exhibit in the International pavilion contains Fray Foam Home, a baffling but charming cloud of coloured stuff, by Andrés Jaque Arquitectos, somehow abstracted from the contents of a typical home. There is a straightforward display of the great postwar Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, whose lightness of touch prefigures Sejima's. There is a very serious, but subtle, plan by the Architectural Research Unit of London for a series of Korean new towns built on reclaimed land. There is a huge model of a piece of Japanese landscape, in which nestles a dewdrop-like Sanaa project. Together these exhibits, ranging from Korean cities to bits of fluff, create an atmosphere, or a series of sensations, or tastes. Architecture is the thing that makes this atmosphere possible, but it does not dominate.
Outside Sejima's immediate control, the place that most responds to her spirit is the British pavilion. It is curated by Vicky Richardson of the British Council and the architect/artist practice muf. It is about cultural traffic between Britain and Venice, represented by the writings and drawings of John Ruskin and institutions such as Venice in Peril. The pavilion aims to be not just a thing to gawp at, but also a place of use to Venetians while it is there, with events, drawing classes and debates, held in a scale model of a section of the 2012 Olympic stadium.
It is also about what muf call "close looking", which means paying attention to the particular and specific. Examples include Ruskin's small notebooks of Venice, returned to the city for the first time since he made them, and an archive of photographs, taken over two decades, of everything in the city from palaces to gas holders. A section of salt marsh is created, of the kind that surrounds Venice and is integral to its ecology, but of which you are unaware when you are in the city. Implicit in the promotion of close looking is a criticism of the kind of masterplanning, as in London's Olympic project, which starts by sweeping away what is already there.
Not everything in the biennale follows the director's lead. There is a display of the West Kowloon cultural district – a plan to correct Hong Kong's perceived lack of culture by building 15 venues all in one go. Three architects are competing for this plum job, and present their ideas in videos of stunning banality. Norman Foster promises streets that are "familiar but different", before displaying spaces that look like a very undifferent kind of mall. Even the legendary brain of Rem Koolhaas has dumbed down for the purposes of this project, but he still deserves to win for having done so the least.
Meanwhile, Audi presented their lavish Urban Futures project, in which an interested group of architects were asked to imagine what cities might be like in the future, especially in relation to transport. Luckily for the sponsors, the future still seems to include cars, albeit driverless ones, which use space more efficiently and allow city streets to be more actively used by pedestrians. The technology is all there, apparently: the show could be either one of those fantasies that will look quaint in 20 years' time, or genuinely prescient.
But it is Sejima's spirit that makes this biennale one of the best in years. The architectural world is currently in the grip of a predictable reaction to the boomtime cult of the icon, when symbols of architectural genius garnished the works of rampant capital. There is a tendency now to think the only valid form of architecture is to help earthquake victims, or do something to solve the Palestinian problem, a tendency that has its own pomposity and vanity. Sejima steps to the side of this opposition, and shows what architects should spend much of their time doing. Which is to make spaces. With people in them.
This year’s Venice Architecture Biennale is about people, not plans
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 31, 2010
Too many design exhibitions are big on architectural theory, but miss what really matters: human beings. This one is different
The problem with architecture exhibitions, so it's argued, is that they lack the one thing you really want to see: real-life buildings. I disagree. The problem with architecture exhibitions is that they fixate on trying to represent buildings that are missing. Photographs, drawings and pretentious wall texts only highlight the fact that yours is a second-hand experience. They place you in the there and then, not the here and now.
The Swiss architect Mario Botta got around this problem spectacularly in 1999 when, for the 400th anniversary of the birth of Francesco Borromini, he built a full-scale wooden model of a cross-section of the baroque master's most famous church, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome. There it was in all its glory – well, half of its glory – on the shore of Lake Lugano.
Most architecture shows don't have Botta's titanic budget. But there is another way, as demonstrated at this year's Venice Architecture Biennale. This is not an exhibition about what buildings look like. Gone is the blowhard shape-making and bad sculpture of the previous biennale, curated by Aaron Betsky in 2008. Neither is it didactic, like the 2006 version, curated by Richard Burdett, which was a blizzard of facts and statistics about cities – vital stuff, but rather like exploring a book pasted on the walls. Instead, this year's show is much more about what should happen inside buildings, the pure experience of space.
The person responsible is Kazuyo Sejima of Japanese practice Sanaa, the architects behind the New Museum in New York and the recent Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne. Sejima is a break from recent biennale directors in that she is a) a woman (the first, in fact) and b) a practising architect. However, perhaps her greatest strength when it comes to curating the biggest architecture show in the world is that she is not an academic. "People meet in architecture" is her theme. It sounds trite, and a little awkward, but this is rather how Sejima speaks. You're never sure whether she is stating the obvious or being incredibly profound. In this case, it seems clear the theme is one that preoccupied her in the making of the Rolex Learning Center, a university building in which there are no walls, just an undulating landscape intended to promote chance meetings between students and disciplines. It's a social education space, like Socrates's Agora but for the Facebook generation.
At the beginning of the Corderie dell'Arsenale, the epic former ropemaking factory of the Venetian navy where a biennale curator tries to make his or her case, there is a 3D movie about that campus building directed by Wim Wenders. Harking back to the famous library scene in his Wings of Desire, Wenders presents the space as a semi-sublime experience. Students free-float angelically, albeit with the slick assurance of actors in a corporate promo video. This rendition of a heavenly space sets the tone for subsequent rooms.
A number of exhibitors have created atmospheric installations that maximise the already considerable drama of this 16th-century building. The architect Tetsuo Kondo and engineers Transsolar have made a cloud with a clearly defined layer of steam floating beneath the rafters, which you can enter and exit like a plane. Almost as ineffable is Junya Ishigami's structure made of thread-like wire so as to be almost invisible. The proposition here is that structure and space (one of which normally encloses the other) can be indistinguishable – a proposition that is clearly on the edge of impossibility, so much so that, last week, it collapsed twice, once after a stray cat couldn't resist having a play (as CCTV footage later revealed).
Sejima has also invited artists to exhibit in the Arsenale. Olafur Eliasson filled his room with a sinister water feature. You enter in pitch black to the sound of water falling, and then realise through the slow strobe lighting that there are streams of it pouring from the ceiling. But instead of falling straight down they are flailing around, whipping the air like the end of a detached high-pressure hose. It's mesmerising, and I imagined people dancing under it. More serenely, Janet Cardiff has separated the voices in Thomas Tallis's Renaissance 40-part choral work Spem in Alium through 40 speakers arranged in a diamond. If you sit in the middle and close your eyes, you feel like a choir of angels is playing blind man's bluff with you.
Captivating moments, but are they architecture? One architect I spoke to felt that Eliasson's water and Transsolar's cloud were simply one-liners. I disagree. That belies how much research and experimentation it took to create them, and they prove there are ways to activate a space that makes a person stop in their tracks and feel alive. It seems clear that this is the message Sejima wants to impart.
But the biennale is not a one-woman show. As well as the main exhibition, dozens of national pavilions get to interpret her theme in their own ways, often lamely but sometimes provocatively. The Dutch pavilion, for example, has created a foam city floating in the air, representing the thousands of state-owned buildings in the Netherlands that are empty – from ex-industrial sites, to disused municipal offices and abandoned churches. People, it seems, do not always meet in architecture. Why focus on new architecture, the curators ask, when so many usable structures are going to waste? Bahrain, meanwhile, took the Golden Lion award for the best pavilion by recreating the ramshackle wooden huts that fisherman have been building on the island's waterfront. On one level, they are simply places to socialise in the open air – "The shopping malls are suffocating," says one fisherman in a video interview – but they are also poignant acts of resistance, attempts to preserve what's left of Bahrain's coastline from the high-rise builders.
For too long, architecture has been the plaything of speculators – not just property developers but city fathers commissioning signature museums as part of their global branding strategies. Buildings are not for portfolios, nor are they simply for architects to express themselves. Sejima reminds us they are for people: people with inner lives, who aren't simply units of flow. The beauty of this year's biennale is that it puts the human experience back at the heart of architecture. Inspiring places are full of spatial and sensory drama. And so are inspiring exhibitions.