Venice: Arsenale - 13th International Architecture Biennale Exhibition. Common Ground is the theme given to this year’s International ArchitectureBiennale Exhibition by its director English architect David Chipperfield. “With this year’s theme, Common Ground, we go back to talking about architecture –
explains the Biennale’s president Paolo
Baratta - to help architects emerge from the crisis of identity they are
going through, and at the same time offering
the public a chance to look inside architecture, make it familiar and discover
that something can be asked of it, that something different is possible,
that we are not condemned to passive acceptance.” Civil society is made up of
individuals and institutions. These do not always seem capable of identifying
the requirements for organizing the space we live in. In order to mend this fracture, la Biennale can make its contribution
primarily by posing these as its themes. While not denying that there is
a problem in the relationship between architecture and ecology, architecture
and technology, and architecture and town planning, the crux is to mend the fracture between architecture and civil society.”
David Chipperfield clarifies that
he chose this theme “to encourage my colleagues to react against the prevalent
professional and cultural tendencies of our time that place such emphasis on
individual and isolated actions. I encouraged them instead to demonstrate the
importance of influence and of the continuity of cultural endeavor, to illustrate common and shared ideas that
form the basis of an architectural culture“.
Arsenale: Bernard
Tschumi Architects. The iconic posters
that Bernard Tschumi made in 1976-1977 were manifestoes for understanding
architecture in its eventful vitality.
They used the tactics of advertising to emphasize the difference between
architecture as described by architectural theory within the academy, and its
disjunctive, sensuous life in reality. Tschumi has
re-conceptualized the series for the Biennale, tackling the theme Common Ground
head on and raising questions that the work in the show must answer.
Sarah and Deyan Sudjic
Arsenale:
Thomas Struth – Unconscious Places.
Thomas Struth’s pictures occupy four locations in the Arsenale, a
recurring exhibition that brings the common ground of the city to
attention. From the informality of an
alleyway in New York to Shanghai to the ersatz skylines of the new cities of
Asia, Struth’s photographs offer a sometimes silent, objective view of urban
life. But almost always present is the
evidence of inhabitation: a market stall, an advertising hoarding, and
sometimes a person, bringing specificity to the typological investigation and
showing how his compositions are also depictions of the diversity of urban
life.
photograph and copyright by manfredi bellati
Arsenale:
Norman Foster Carlos Carcas Charles Sandison – Gateway. The two broad interpretations of common
ground examined in the Biennale are those of the history of architecture, and
of the public spaces of the city.
Foster, with the artist Charles Sandison and the film director Carlos
Carcas, tackles both in projection and sound.
The result is a collage: a depiction of architectural culture verging on
the encyclopedic, presented in a way that invites us to make connections
between diverse sources.
The names of
great architects spread across the floor, as images of cities and buildings are
projected on the walls: the historic,
canonical spaces of the western world; the new cities of Asia and South
America; places of upheaval and social change and the huge interiors of today –
stadia, museums, termini – the architecture creates.
Lord Foster
Arsenale:
O’Donnell - Tuomey – Vessel. For Irish
architects Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey, architectural practice is inseparable
from the architecture, art and literature of others. A stacked timber ‘Vessel’ provides a place of
contemplation and a means of directing views towards tables with contributions
from poets, artists, and other architects. This rich field of affinities
provides a background to the vessel, which is itself a material response to the
ubiquitous brick walls of the Arsenale.
The common
ground here described is one that articulates the relationship between
architecture’s physical and intellectual contexts.
Arsenale: FAT - Museum of Copying. To Fat, the rhetoric of architectural
influence and affinity might be reduced to an apparently banal concept:
copying. Instead FAT’s installation
reveals copying to be a rich terrain.
The centerpiece of their exhibition is a large-scale cast of Palladio’s
Villa Rotonda, a building from the Veneto that could claim to be the most
copied building in architectural history, spawning homages and rip-offs across
the glove.
FAT’s Museum
of Copying also recognizes that copying threatens the mythology of recent
architectural production, based on ideas of an author’s originality and
individual genius. FAT and their
collaborators are relaxed about copying: the sources are out there to plunder,
and architecture has always done so in the most direct ways.
Arsenale: Cino Zucchi - Copycat, Empathy and Envy as Form Makers –
Special Mention. A Special Mention goes to Cino Zucchi for an installation,
which ‘aims to evoke a complex network of relationships that shape our physical
environment’. The jury believes that this serves as an exemplary reminder of
the all-embracing theme of the Common Ground exhibition.
Copycat aims to highlight how forms propagate
like a contagion combining imitation and innovation, resulting in a sequence of
variations of a common theme. Each of
the metal wardrobes gathered around a central ‘square’ contains a collection of
objects united by the principle of the “almost similar”: entomological boxes,
bread-rolling pins from Rajasthan, models of submarines, photographs, souvenir
buildings. Similarity, rather than
“originality”, makes the dialogue between individuals possible, giving shape to
the urban landscapes constituting the beloved background of our existence.
Arsenale: Herzog and De Meuron – Elbphilharmonie. Buildings sometimes become battlegrounds as
much as common grounds, and Herzog and De Meuron’s Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg,
Germany, is one.
This concert hall project became a crucible of political, budgetary and
ideological debate in Hamburg, and the project is presented here in the form of
large-scale models, against the background of the many column inches the project
generated in German newspapers from its inception to today. For Herzog and De Meuron, what is brought to
light here are the invisible forces that form the context of every
architectural project.
photograph and copyright manfredi bellati
Arsenale: Zaha Hadid Architect
Patrick Schumacher – Arum. The
spectacular form of Zaha Hadid’s installation appears not as a self-sufficient
artwork, but against the background of the practice’s influences ZHA considers
its work as on a line of continuity with the great masters of thin shell and
tensile structures like Felix Candela and Heinz Isler. This
new piece entitled Arum, is shown against a background of artefacts from these
pioneers. This lineage is also extended
forwards, in the work of a young researcher of stone compression shells, Philip
Block, in addition to Hadid’s current students at the University of Applied
Arts in Vienna.
Zaha Hadid Architects - Arum – 2012 – Paper Study Model.