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Dispatch from the Venice Biennale: a healthy dose of dissent from Detroit Resists, The Architecture Lobby and more

2016-06-06T18:14:00-04:00

The criticisms generated by productions as significant as the Venice Biennale reveal just as much—if not more—about the central ecology of the event as its official material. Evidenced by the gradient of oppositions representing the national pavilions (and even a handful of Aravena’s curated projects), the inclusive nature of the “Reporting from the Front” agenda manages, intentionally or not, to filter in detractors and cultivate an atmosphere of issue-airing.

The assembly of sometimes wildly disparate perspectives and approaches that comprise this year’s Biennale sets up the conditions for the calling out and, hopefully, working through of the architecture discipline’s contemporary conflicts and quandaries. Several counter movements worked their way into the exhibition—stirrings, perhaps, that are indicative of interests to which the Arsenale and Giardini will give form or ground (again) next time.

At the outset, Alejandro Aravena’s opening panel, “Meetings on Architecture: Infrastr...

Editor's Picks #447

2016-06-05T16:03:00-04:00

Julia Ingalls wrote about architectural solutions, four major U.S. cities have used, to address homelessness. no_form quipped "Giving homeless people housing solves homelessness. Wow, fucking brilliant. Took long enough to recognize the obvious."

Plus, Nicholas Korody previewed Anupama Kundoo's "Building Knowledge" and examined "Sarajevo Now" as part of Archinect’s 2016 Venice Biennale coverage.

News
The Guardian provided a First look: inside the Switch House. The new "arresting brick ziggurat" for Tate Modern's. jla-x, commented "Those stairs are beautiful."

The news that Swiss architect Simon Kretz is the lucky protégé who will get to work with David Chipperfield in a year-long architecture mentorship (from the 2016-17 Rolex Arts Initiative), kickstarted a discussion about diversity, "white male shit...." and mentoring vs patronage. Marc Miller paused to put things in perspective, via an amazing podcast with Mabel Wilson from Columbia. "The were some crazy points brought up, like the...

Dispatch from the Venice Biennale: IKEA meets Super Realism, Nostalgia and Nationalism, British Pavilion and Russian Pavilion

2016-06-04T16:39:00-04:00

The 2016 Venice Biennale challenged, through its theme, architects to engage with the pressing concerns of the world, issues that affect the majority of the world population, whether it is safety and security, the quality and quantity of housing or the cost and scarcity of materials. It raises the question of what is architecture and what impact can it have and what is the role of the architect, the news on the British and Russian Pavilions is that they have very different takes on that position.

The British Pavilion is slick and sophisticated, with finely crafted elements and objects. One enters a strange world of Super-Realist IKEA. It is a serious work, no Monty Python humour here, which was enjoyable with the 2014 installation. It takes the future question of housing and living through five time frames, with installations by different designers, from minutes to years, looking at shared living, ‘shell’ housing, and re-functioning. A projection of future living, asking some fundame...

Reporting from the Front of 'Reporting from the Front': mulling over Aravena's Biennale, ft. special guest Andrea Dietz on Archinect Sessions #66

2016-06-02T15:49:00-04:00

Andrea Dietz spent four days in Venice reporting on the Biennale's opening for us, and brought back her reflections on the hallowed event—in all its chaotic, problematic, inspiring, messy glory—to discuss with us on the podcast. Amidst the fray, one thing came out clearly: the map is not the territory.

Listen to episode 66 of Archinect Sessions, Reporting from the Front of 'Reporting from the Front':

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Shownotes:

Andrea's missives from Venice:

Dispatch from the Venice Biennale: Glimmers of hope ‘beyond the banal and self-harming’

2016-06-01T17:14:00-04:00

Reporting from the Front seeks to also explore which forces—political, institutional or other—drive the architecture that goes “beyond the banal and self-harming”. The 2016 Venice Biennale calls for entries that not only exist in and of themselves, but that are a part of a larger social transformation. As Alejandro Aravena suggests, “improving the quality of the built environment is an endeavor that has to tackle many fronts: from guaranteeing very concrete, down-to-earth living standards […] to expanding the frontiers of civilization.” Pavilions that go down this path exhibit very specific examples of how architecture expands its frontiers.

The Ireland Pavilion’s installation, Losing Myself, explores the different layers of a building as experienced by people suffering from dementia. Co-curator Niall McLaughlin contextualizes the experience of this condition: “when you have dementia you lose the capacity to remember, to find yourself… a little bit like what happens in Venice after w...

Dispatch from the Venice Biennale: Brazilian togetherness, Chinese traditions and Australian lidos

2016-06-01T14:58:00-04:00

This year's Biennale has tried to raise fundamental issues around the role of the architect through social and economic issues. Challenges of social inequality, housing, urbanisation, are found across the world but perhaps they are nowhere more apparent than in the cities of Brazil.

The Curator of the Brazilian Pavilion, Washington Fajardo—architect, planner, government and advisor to the Rio de Janeiro Mayor—aimed to "present the stories of people who struggle for and effect change in the face of institutional passivity in the nation's big cities." These are often platitudes but in the Brazilian show there is a depth and reality that may not be at first apparent, it is a serious show dealing with serious issues. Through the title, "Juntos [Together]", the pavilion exhibits a number of projects across Brazil. One example being Programme Vivenda, a government supported program in São Paulo that brought about small changes through a DIY support program for favelas. At the same time, th...

Dispatch from the Venice Biennale: rewarding obscurity

2016-05-31T17:22:00-04:00

Much will be published over the coming days about the Biennale's national pavilion winners—Spain’s “Unfinished” (with the Golden Lion) and Japan’s “en: Art of Nexus” and Peru’s “Our Amazon Frontline” (with special mentions). It is a phenomenon that conceals the terrain, limiting the perspective of the majority, and inaccurately reduces the dynamism of the lived experience. At the same time, after the fascination with the nominations wears off, it garners those passed over with a certain mystique. In the interest of representation and curiosity, then, it seems fitting to acknowledge a (very) small sampling of the more and wider.

Oh, Canada. This year, per curator Pierre Bélanger, the Canadians overcame “a list of every possible bureaucratic, logistical, and material blockade imaginable multiplied times three” in order to participate in the Biennale. With their permanent pavilion closed for construction and an agitator’s stance, the “Extraction” team’s contribution is all fight. They t...

Dispatch from the Venice Biennale: Mediterranean connections through the crisis

2016-05-31T09:36:00-04:00

Alejandro Aravena’s brief for the Fifteenth International Architecture Exhibition at the 2016 Venice Biennale calls for projects that “are scrutinizing the horizon looking for new fields of action, facing issues like segregation, inequalities, peripheries, access to sanitation, natural disasters, housing shortage, migration, informality, crime, traffic, waste, pollution and the participation of communities.” Some curators have taken a belligerent approach, while others have used it to connect places that are geographically separated by culturally linked.

Darzanà, the Turkey Pavilion on the second floor of the Arsenale Sale d’Armi, displays a single object: a vessel. Its name, Baştarda, references the hybrid ships characteristic of Turkey and Italy from the eleventh to the nineteenth century. They are ships with no clear origin, the illegitimate children of assembled parts of undefined origin. “We want to change the negative connotation of the word,” declares Mehmet Kütükçüoğlu, one o...

Dispatch from the Venice Biennale: a couple of things that don’t quite fit

2016-05-30T19:04:00-04:00

Decided at Dinner (When Digestion Begins)

The theme of this year’s Nordic Countries’ Pavilion, “In Therapy: Nordic Countries Face to Face,” captures a quality underpinning this year’s Biennale positioning and consistent across its many contributions. Finland, Norway, and Sweden, by pulling back their facades of model nationhood and revealing their inner turmoil in an architectural play on psychoanalysis, have set-up an apt analogy for an impression that builds up throughout the Biennale experience. Their stepped pyramid installation, a metaphor for Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, aligns architectural projects with the hurdles to mental health and well-being – and establishes an association that puts the rest of the Biennale on the couch, as well.

Aravena invited the sharing and the world obliged – with all of its issues, in a prolific expression of words and multi-media translations.

A Little Bit of Context

One of the Biennale’s three Special Projects, “A World of Fragile Parts,” t...

Dispatch from the Venice Biennale: Unfinished processes and unseen industries

2016-05-30T18:20:00-04:00

The lady on the ladder chosen as the image for the 2016 Biennale Architettura sees, amidst “great disappointments[,] creativity and hope,” states Paolo Baratta, president of the Venice Biennale. “[S]he sees them in the here-and-now, not in some uncertain aspirational, ideological future.” Several pavilions choose this approach to portray “trends going […] towards renewal”; encouraging instances of the how profession addresses the challenges outlined by Aravena.

This year’s recipient of the Golden Lion for Best National Participation, Spain’s Unfinished, showcases 55 different projects that have reimagined the “unfinished remains of […] the largest construction enterprise in Spanish history,” as described by co-curator Iñaqui Carnicero. The Pavilion, located at the entrance of the Giardini, feels open and easy to navigate. The language of the unfinished comes out in every detail. Suspended metal stud frames make of the main room a playful sequence to the exhibition. Additional project...

Reviewing from the periphery to the heart of the Venice Biennale; from the Nigerian to the Nordic

2016-05-30T06:41:00-04:00

‘Reporting from the Front’, the theme of the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, provokes and stimulates, and with the extensive intensity of the exhibition a useful approach to review and reflect is to move from the periphery, to the heart of the Biennale and back again; in this case stumbling upon Nigeria’s Pavilion on Giudecca island, then to the heart of the Giardini and the Nordic Countries Pavilion.

The Biennale is a phenomenon: it stimulates, it exhausts, and it is addictive. The diversity of architectural production, local and global, expands inside the viewers’ veins and synapses. The backdrop to the Biennale, Venice, is a sublime, architectural drug on its own. Italo Calvino in ‘Invisible Cities’ describes the city beautifully, as multiple cities in one. The Architecture Biennale, is a microcosm of a city within a city, where the new and old connect. In 2014 Koolhaas’s, ‘Fundamentals’, the fourteenth Biennale, was expanded with a longer period and an intensification of the t...

Dispatch from the Venice Biennale: 'Cool' kids and guerrilla interventions

2016-05-27T18:05:00-04:00

The general atmosphere at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, Reporting from the Front, is one of excitement, of subversion. The Fifteenth edition of the Biennale explicitly calls for instances where architecture is an “instrument of self-government, of humanist civilization, and a demonstration of the ability of humans to become masters of their own destinies.” In that spirit, the usual suspects of a Biennale move to the sidelines, giving way to those working on the ground to prove that architecture can make a difference.

Cool Capital, the South Africa Pavilion at the Arsenale, brings Pretoria to the limelight by challenging the historical interaction between citizens and public space. “Pretoria has a huge political baggage and negative connotation”, curator Pieter Mathews explains, adding that “guerrilla interventions want to look at the city with new eyes; take whatever is good from the past and use it.” The Pavilion features selected works from the Cool Capital platform—the fi...

Dispatch from the Venice Biennale: Uruguay's underground, Germany's construction site, Britain's housekeeping and more from the national pavilions

2016-05-27T13:40:00-04:00

May 26, 2016

Aravena’s Biennale for architecture to give a damn might imply a specific kind of project, but, after one day on the ground, it is clear that there is no one way for it to respond. For one thing, there is a truly incomprehensible quantity of material to cover. The volume alone speaks to the complex of energy and passion coming worldwide from the discipline. After an incomplete first pass around the Giardini and a tactical visit to the Arsenale, Venice’s two main Biennale sites, I am struck by the inconsistency and individuality across and within these many contributions. Noteworthy trends may, at some point, emerge from the crowd, but, for now, I can list a few, non-representative soundbites only:

The US Pavilion, “The Architectural Imagination,” gives us architecture as we have come to expect it. Through twelve proposals for four Detroit sites, it posits the speculative as the instrument of societal uplift, offering up wild thinking as the means of igniting change. It do...

Dispatch from the Venice Biennale: a call for architects to give a damn

2016-05-26T19:05:00-04:00

May 25, 2016:

At La Biennale Architettura di Venezia, architecture packages itself for a global forum. It is a distinct occasion through which the world’s constructs and place-makings converge in a single microcosm. Against the backdrop of a sinking city, designers and works tapped to represent national architectural accomplishment invoke a comparative sizing-up. In displays, with ceremony, at a flurry of events and celebrations, architecture gets to sift through its disciplinary priorities. This gathering of architectural seeing and being seen is significant for the scene it projects into the expanded field.

This year, the 15th International Architecture Exhibition, the tone to the official introductory texts suggests a dissatisfaction with past performances. Paolo Barrata, Biennale President, announces the 2016 show with an identification of tendency in those previous years to “deplore the present” as “characterized by increasing disconnection between architecture and civil society....