Some good old-fashioned bootstrapping as the US pavilion celebrates the "proactive, entrepreneurial spirit of architects, engineers and designers who recognize the transformational potential of focused partnerships." Plus, a seemingly unrelated installation from MOS, who call their work, "diet-architecture."
Some good old-fashioned bootstrapping as the US pavilion celebrates the "proactive, entrepreneurial spirit of architects, engineers and designers who recognize the transformational potential of focused partnerships." Entitled, "Workshopping," the US curators Michael Rooks of the High Museum of Art and John D. Solomon of 306090 invited Archeworks (Chicago), Terraform (NYC), cityLAB (LA), Hood Design) (Oakland), Architecture Research Office (LSU Coastal Sustainability Studio) and John Portman & Associates (Atlanta) to show their pioneering strategies.
I was familiar with most of the work, as urban food growing projects (Archeworks), community based landscape architecture (Hood Design), and urban theory (Terraform). But I was interested in the inclusion of John Portman Associates Peachtree Center in Atlanta. I haven't been, and this installation didnt really tell anything about what the Peachtree Center was like as an experience or how it has impacted the surrounding communities, as it just seems like a big corporate enterprise. The installation also didn't make legible the process for getting it built -- architect as landowner, as client, as entrepreneur.
Does anyone have thoughts on this project? It seemed quite different in its scale and strategic ethos than some of the other projects on display, like the small urban food growing project of Archeworks.
But then there's an infographic-ready project from Terraform, who presented "New York City (Steady) State," a large-scale inquiry that seeks to answer the question: can New York City become self-sufficient within it's polictical boundaries?
The US pavilion opted for the fall-back strategy of re-presenting projects rather than transforming their pavilion into a new sort of vision, or better ... testing some of these pioneering strategies in Venice, to build partnerships and make the process a living experience of workshopping.
But they did have one installation, which doesn't appear to have any relationship with the workshopping theme ... a calorie-light canopy by MOS (Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample) called Instant Untitled.
It's light, it's fun ... was it just meant to be a counterweight to the "heavier" ideas inside?
"Instant Untitled has a small carbon footprint. It barely even exists. It's an urban figment ... This type of architecture is like diet-architecture, a copy without the calories." -- MOS
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