KURT W. FORSTER says that directing the ninth Venice Architecture Biennale has required "divine guidance." First, the Italian government cut the show's budget, which was already spaghetti-thin, forcing him to become a "beggar on every corner in Europe," he said. Then he had to postpone the opening after organizers of the Venice International Film Festival, which attracts large crowds to the city, decided to hold their event a week later than planned, creating a conflict with his own. From the NY Times
But Mr. Forster, the former director of the Canadian Center for Architecture, said he is determined that the Biennale, now scheduled to run from Sept. 12 through Nov. 7, will be more than just a collection of drawings and photos. "I want you to have direct physical contact with things that are going on in the architecture world," he said by telephone from Venice.
To achieve that, Mr. Forster, a Swiss-born curator and author, commissioned more than a dozen room-size installations, to be built mostly with donated materials. Kengo Kuma, a Japanese architect, will install a Zen garden where, Mr. Forster said, "instead of having monks rake the ground into waves, the work will be done by a robot, imposing technology on ground that seems almost sacred."
Peter Eisenman has created what he calls "a tour of 500 years of architectural history" — a series of rooms that demonstrate the shift from Palladian symmetry to the more complex organization of 21st-century buildings. "You won't feel like you're hanging around in familiar quarters," Mr. Forster said. Mr. Eisenman, 72, has been at every Biennale since the beginning and will have more work in this one than ever before.
In the Arsenale, an old naval basin, Mr. Forster will install a floating exhibition showing how cities are connecting with their harbors. The show's central theme is metamorphosis, demonstrated on three huge screens with ice turning to water, to vapor and to snow.
Forty countries will have exhibitions of their own. In the British pavilion, Ron Arad will show renderings of a futuristic hotel nestled among the four smokestacks of the Battersea Power Station in London. In the United States pavilion, whose curators, at the behest of the State Department, are the editors of Architectural Record, Studio Gang Architects of Chicago will show a project that might be of particular interest to New Yorkers: a stadium that folds away, disappearing into the buildings around it when it is not in use.
The near conflict with the film festival had one advantage for Mr. Forster: he was able to arrange for Peter Greenaway, a British director whose film sets influence architects and are influenced by them, to speak to invited guests on Sept. 10.
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