Friday, October 29, 2010

VENICE: photos from the 12th BIENNALE DI ARCHITETTURA directed by the Japanese architect, Kazuyo Sejima - until November 21st.


2010 AWARDS:
Golden Lion Award – Best Project: Junya Ishigami
Golden Lion Award - lifetime achievement:
Rem koolhaas

Silver Lion Award: Office: Kersten Geers, David Van Severen + Bas Princen.


Sir Norman Foster



Mario Bellini



Ennio and Giorgia Brion


 Beatriz Colomina and Trinh T. Minh-ha.



Golden Lion Award for Best National Pavilion: Kingdom of Bahrain.


The installation of three fisherman’s huts witness the bond between sea and architecture.



…and at the same time introduces the problems born from progressive urbanization of the territory.


A few of the team of the architects and designers of the Bahrain Pavilion.  Front row: from left to right: Tamadher Al Fahal, Noura Al Sayeh, Fay Al Khalifa, Fatema Al Hammadi, Deema Ashraf, Mona Yateem. Back row: Mohammad Al Qari, Leopold Banchini, Dr. Fuad Al Ansari (curator).


Golden Lion Award for Best Project.  Architecture as Air: Study for Chateau La Coste /2010 by Junya.Ishigami + Associates/ Japan. The components: delicate specially-designed columns, beams and bracing: indeterminate contours lacking true physical form that dissolve into the transparent space rather than ‘structures’ supporting the building…


Junya Ishigami  “…even the structure that gives a building its very shape may no longer be clear but rather void-lie.”



Olafur Eliasson/ Denmark: Your Split Second House/2010. A split second is the space between two seconds.  The gap between past, present and future: not just now, but the part of now that is a void, seemingly frozen in time.  In it, nothing changes…



Olafur Eliasson “…We do not feel the split second, but only realize afterwards that we have lived through it.”



Transsolar & Tetsuo Kondo Architects/ Germany.  Cloudscapes / 2010.  
They create Cloudscapes, a place to experience a real cloud from below, within, and above floating in the center of the Arsenale.  The path winds through the cloud.




Clouds are an important elements of our atmosphere, framing outdoor space and filtering sunlight.



Wim Wenders/Germany. If Buildings Could Talk, a 3D video installation: 
…some of them would sound like Shakespeare.
Others would speak like the Financial Times.
Yet others would praise God, or Allah.
Some would just whisper….






Wim Wenders “ The building you encounter is a particularly gentle and friendly one, made for learning, reading and communicating…."




Janet Cardiff / Canada. The Forty Part Motet / 2001.  The audio work is based on the Renaissance choral music Spem in alium nunquam habui by Thomas Tallis (1514-1585). Forty separately recorded voices are played back through forty speakers strategically placed throughout the space.  





Frank Gehry
presented Luma/Parc des Ateliers, an architectural project for a new cultural model located in the centre of Arles, France.




Anton Garcia-Abril – Ensemble Studio. Balancing Act.
Balancing Act is a game of equilibrium.  Two structural lines in the longitudinal space of the Arsenale buildings, which operate as an agent to modify the original space.  The structural columns supporting the weight of the building provide the “tempo” of the visit.  The new forces incorporated into this space play with this rhythm creating a new order: the dissonant balance of the Balancing Act is just one chord.






 Hans Ulrich Obrist/Switzerland. 2006 Serpentine 24-Hour Interview Marathon.
The 2006 Serpentine 24-Hour Interview Marathon launched the annual Serpentine series.  To explore the topology of the city from inside Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed leading figures in contemporary culture continuously over 24 hours in the Serpentine Gallery pavilion designed by Rem Koolhaas.   


Taping the interviews.


  Tony Fretton and Mark Pimlott


Hans Ulrich Obrist


On screen - Andrea Branzi.


Smiljan Radic + Marcela Correa/Chile. The Boy Hidden by the Fish.  After the earthquake we want to rebuild the future that was protected, perfumed and peaceful, like the kind you can sense behind the dry line of David Hockney etching.  We will use the shell of solid natural granite with holes drilled in it, and inside we will place a box made with perfumed Cedro wood.  Refuge must be found inside.


Andres Jaque Arquitectos / Spain. Fray Foam Home / 2010.  Fray Foam Home is the restitution of the fragmented spaces in which a specific home – with its comforts, supplies and fictions - is constructed. 




Andres Jaque 




Yoshitaka Tanase e Rei






….Sweet Homes are no longer apolitical spaces for familiarity, but distant-bubble-made-foams joined by conflict and fray.   Distribution and uses of water, energy exploitation, rights for access to fiction, engagement with transgendered individual roles are the arenas in which societies get shaped. 



Studio Andrea Branzi/Italy. Per Una Nuova Carta di Atene.  
La Citta Reale – 2010. Modello teorico della civilta merceologica.
Today we live in a world that ‘no longer has an exterior’, neither political nor geographical; a globalized world made up of a sum of numerous local and environmental crises.





Nicoletta and Andrea Branzi






Non Figurative Architecture. …A world made up of ‘many worlds’; opaque, polluted, where everything merges and expands; to survive it must ‘reform itself daily’ with new laws, new statues, new plans to manage its own ‘allied activities’ that are out of control…








Atelier Bow-Wow/Japan. 
Atelier Bow-Wow is interested in the behavior of micro/macro climates in our living environment, people and buildings.  






…Its installation shows this behavioral landscape through 1:20 models of its projects in Tokyo, Karuizawa, California and Amsterdam.



Aldo Cibic/Italy. Rethinking Happiness. 
The economic crisis and environment emergency are making us rethink how to face our future.  New Realities for Changing Lifestyle presents four diverse visions of new ideas for our daily life.





Aldo Cibic




Rural Urbanism, where the city meets country and the country meets city.




Gianni Silva, Alessandro Mendini and Benedetto Gravagnuolo



Do ho Suh + Suh Architects/Korea. Blueprint./2010.  Blueprint is the dialogue between an artist’s home and its past, present and future silhouette.  Do Ho Suh’s work is a full scale 12.7 meter tall, fabric façade of the New York townhouse where he currently lives.  





Suh Architects’ full-scale floor installation is a composite image of three facades: Sho Suh’s current home, the hanok in which both brothers grew up, and a typical Venetian villa.  This hard imagined “shadow” thus reflects a soft, existing home’s faced. Blurring one’s notion of home.





Eulho Suh, Do ho Suh and KyungEn Kim







BELGIAN PAVILION. Usus/Usures.
The Belgium project could be considered open research.  With particular attention to the theme of materials and their use, the project investigates architecture and its role as a litmus test for the functions and
customs of contemporary society
 Acrylic fibre carpet from a living room adjacent to a bedroom and a hallway.  Both rooms had chimneys and gas convectors..




Exotic wood flooring from the back of a university auditorium.  The sample was marked in the middle where a barrier was attached.




Serbia Pavilion. Seesaw Play-grow – Non Equilibrium Ground by “Skart” (rejection) (Djoroje Balzamovic, Dragan Protic, Goran Petrovic). See-saws, objects you usually find in children’s play-grounds, become an invitation to play and act, to meet people and open dialogues.  Un-balanced and un-stable grounds become symbols of aggression






the lunch boxes




Djoroje Balzamovic





Dragan Protic




Venice Pavilion.  The Venetian Pavilion pays double homage to sculpture Toni Benetton and architect, Toni Follina. Their work originated from similar reflections.  Above Toni Benetton’s Townscape 1985-86, double panel and painted model. The Townscapes that Benetton invented, but never carried out, were in huge Corten steel thought to give new meaning to urban areas and new dignity to peripheral palaces and not precious architecture.





Enzo Mari




United States of America Pavilion.   Instant Untitled is an artificial environment installation by Mos, outside the American pavilion.  It is formed by a changing and shifting ecology of 38 helium balloons secured by 2,500 linear feet of bright green nylon strap to 18 disks. 22 bent steel benches provide a rest area in the shade.   The sound of rustling leaves mixes with that of the partially deflated Mylar, creating ideal conditions for repose.




Miyuki Calatroni and Hisayuki Amae






















Czechoslovakian Pavilion.  Natural architecture consists in experimenting buildings in harmony with nature.  




....Its aims to be a solution to current crisis of the civilization, re-founding our relationship with natural world and giving architecture a new social role.





Martin Rajnis





....The refusal of technology, the use of wood, stone, glass and alternative energetic sources give the visitor the feeling he is in a true natural environment that communicates in an ‘emotional’ way.





Kazuyo Sejima & Associates + Office of Ryue Nishizawa.  “Upon completion the museum we are currently designing for Teshima ( an island in the Seto Island Sea) will provide a simple functional space for a collection of work on permanent display.  The site is located on a low range of hills that looks out onto the ocean.  This beautiful environment, in which rice paddies lie side by side amongst untouched nature, contains zero commercial buildings or private residences.”





Kazuyo Sejima




The official Biennale of Architecture party.   The Biennale party for architects and designers was held on the rooftop of its headquarters in Palazzo Giustinian overlooking the Basin of Saint Mark’s, the Churches of San Giorgio and the Salute.




Hans Hollein and Paolo Baratta




Patrizia Moroso




Junya Ishigami




Ben Aranda




Achille Scaringi Raspagliesi, Gilda Bojardi and Mario Nani





Sigrid de Montrond






Mark Pimlott and Cristiana Costanzo






Kazuko Koike, Nicoletta Morozzi and Alvise Passigli







Kazuyo Sejima




One of the paper lanterns illuminating the terrace of Ca Giustinian.






German Pavilion.  
The pavilion investigates the desire and the search for essential feelings, for intimate and sensual aspects of architecture, showing what is usually private and hidden. 






....Visualization inspired to elusive and immaterial patterns, an interpretation of the aspirations leading artistic and rational decisions.  Desires are at the origin of every creative activity





A drawing by Matteo Thun.





Philippe Duboy and Marialuisa Frisia








Piero Lissoni



British Pavilion.  The Puddle outside the pavilion.





The Stadium of Close Looking.   Part of a 1:10 scale model of the London Olympic stadium re-imagined as a drawing studio.  It has been custom built and the structure is designed to be dismantled and reassembled in another location.





Liza Fior  of Muf



The Venetian references deriving from John Ruskin’s book The Stones of Venice and the influence Frankenstein had in Great Britain on pub and villas projects.   The works turns around the strong relationship between focus, detail and strategy, as the writer did observing Venice.    An exchange of collaboration Venetian and contents.




John Ruskin's Venetian notebooks.




The Ruskin Wing.





Lagoon Birds.  This section, curated by Jane da Mosto, is dedicated to life in the Venice Lagoon and explores the common theme of detail and perspective while also explaining Venice’s unique situation.




Jane da Mosto and David Wilkes




The Lagoon Tank.





Silvio Fasanotti, Maria Grazia Montesi and Antonia Jannone






Marva Griffin


Hungarian Pavilion – BorderLine. What do architects do?  They don’t build houses, they don’t create spaces: architects draw. Lines.
90 km of rope, 20,000 pencils.



…Lines are not spaces, but can be considered the atoms of architecture, the smallest units still visually understandable, a sort of Esperanto, a universal language for the understanding of various national architectures.




Iranian Pavilion – Persian Garden.  Reconnecting to the theme of encounter, the garden represents a noble example of Iranian art and creativity. 




Mojtaba Kalhor






 The garden is the ultimate place of social cohesion, where people meet, enjoy nature and indulge in mystic contemplation.





Garden Concept by Mojtaba Kalhor





Biennale Library.  The new Library of the Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts – ASAC finds its place in the completely restored wing of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in the Giardini.





The archives of Contemporary Arts.






Carlo Scarpa Sculpture Garden - Conversations on Mineral Furnishings. Architects and designers gather round Francesca Von Habsburg to discuss Occupying Sites, the event was moderated by Shumon Basar.





Sam Chermayeff, Lars Muller and Cyrille Berger


Laurent Berger


Do Ho Suh





 Greek Pavilion. The Ark Old Seeds for New Cultures. 
In the middle of a social and economic crisis, the Greek multimedia installation presents two viewpoints on the problem and research foci. On the one hand the spread of the metropolis on the other hand the rampant environmental decay.





Zissis Kotionis and Phoebe Giannisi




A wooden ark represents the environment with its biodiversity – from seeds to gastronomy, as a source of material wealth and cultural encounter









Luisa and Sam Baron




 Photograph courtesy Australian Pavilion
Australian pavilion.  Now + When Australian Urbanism.  The present, including five of the most interesting urban and non-urban regions and the future, set after the 2050 thanks to a new 3D stereoscope. 
Symbiotic City





Photograph courtesy Australian Pavilion
…17 futuristic urban atmospheres and town scenes seen from different urbanizations perspectives amaze the visitor.
The Oceanic City






John Gollings and David Pidgeon
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