For 16 nonconsecutive years, architecture has had a starring role at the Venice Biennale, located at the Southeast tip of Venice Italy. Countries from around the world represent their best architectural research and design; first within designated buildings on two campuses and second - if they strike a chord with visitors - throughout social media channels. What is often strewn across the internet are only the most daring designs and the most apparent research intentions: full-scale prototypes, immersive ephemera and provocative statements as big as the walls that contain them.
What the social media universe rarely gets to see from the Biennale, however, are the pamphlets that its visitors collect ravenously as they pass from pavilion to pavilion. These print documents reveal a significant amount of information relative to the individual pavilions (and significantly more than the photos of those pavilions themselves); some of them have short stories, a few are evasively poetic, while many others are plainly explanatory.
For those of you unable to visit, here are just a few of the pamphlets collected from the 2018 Venice Biennale.
The Argentinian Pavilion is a mirrored interior environment that takes on a long and narrow profile to mirror the space that contains it. The accompanying pamphlet is similarly proportioned: when folded, it is no larger than a CD case; when unfolded, it features a masterful photo of the installation on one side and preliminary sketches on the other.
The interior of the Australian Pavilion is plant rich and text sparse. The newspaper-like pamphlet near the front entrance, therefore, becomes a necessary component, beginning with the succinct statement of purpose on its cover: "Architecture actively engaging with the repair of the places it is part of." Inside, it contains a list of projects designed to repair the grasslands around Australia through architectural production.
With seating to the rafters awash in a signature EU blue, it is apparent upon first entering the Belgian Pavilion that its intention is to provide a forum for considering the state of the European Union. Visitors must be careful when ripping the newsprint pamphlet off the wall, which begins with a clear description of the space: "Here is a sanctuary where citizens are building the new Europe." What follows is a short story, translated into several disparate languages, about traveling through European borders in the current political climate.
After visiting the comically (and, to some, frustratingly) sparse British Pavilion, visitors are handed a pamphlet providing insights into "The Abandoned Pavilion," an event space to be animated by "students, actors, musicians and others" during the duration of the Biennale. The pamphlet also informs the visitor of an alternate space built high above the main one, titled "The Platform," which its curators believe "create[s] a sense of reconstruction and restoration."
The Estonian Pavilion is one of the few not inside one of the two main Biennale Campuses. It is, instead, built into an abandoned church building in an adjacent neighborhood. They appear to have relished their anomalous position, choosing to present an exhibition that questions the status of "strong" and "weak" forms in the city in a building that had, itself, lost some of its original symbolic power since its abandonment. The pamphlet accompanying the exhibition features a floor plan, site map and descriptive text on one side and an attractively designed poster on the other.
Visitors to the French Pavilion are first overwhelmed by the plethora of objects on the walls (that might readily remind an American audience of an eccentric rest stop). The rest of the pavilion is similarly dense with information, leading many visitors to consult the newspaper-formatted pamphlet by the front door. Filled with charming and whimsical illustrations, it wastes little time informing its reader that the French Pavilion takes advantage of the infinite possibilities that space can engender. "10 Infinite Places" are highlighted throughout to demonstrate how French architects have uniquely challenged the rigidity of event spaces.
The German Pavilion placed its research 28 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The interior of the pavilion appears first as a foreboding wall; but as one walks in further, that single wall dissolves into several freestanding columns, each with information about architectural projects on the site of the former Berlin Wall. The press release for the pavilion is a single sheet of ordinary printer paper, with a bold title font on one side and a plain text on the other.
Though the Latvian Pavilion is not much larger than a mall kiosk, the scales of its ambitions are nothing less than a widespread building revolution. Its subject is the typical apartment building, which its curators believe "organizes life together and apart simultaneously." The four categories that they believe define the individual in the apartment typology are each given a page in its handsomely-designed and starkly monochromatic brochure.
The Lithuanian Pavilion is one of the few others outside of the main Biennale campuses. Its location in Venice bring a lot of curious visitors to its interior and backyard, which has already hosted several events connecting Venice's environment to swamp ecologies. This theme has inspired the production of booklets, designed to have the look and feel of instructional manuals. While each one has the same mossy green cover with the distinct 'swamp' font, the interiors are customized for the three different swamp school event series held within the space.
The walls of the Spanish Pavilion are strewn with images, diagrams, short texts and illustrations, amounting to an unfiltered image of the present, as its curators had intended. The accompanying brochure, which has the look, size and quality of a local newspaper, appears to be a continuation of this theme, with the same graphic design quality as the walls it represents.
The curators of the USA Pavilion have turned its stately building into a museum of citizenship at different scales, from the Citizen to the Cosmos. The neon green that ties the various scales together within the pavilion is present in the brochure, a card-stock pamphlet with a detachable dodecahedron on the cover. Its manifesto-like short text is in English and in Italian, beginning with a bold call to arms: "In a time when the expansion of the United States-Mexico border wall looms over more nuanced discourses on national citizenship, it is urgent for architects and designers to envision what it means to be a citizen today."
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