Venice – Giardini #1: 13th International Architecture Biennale
Exhibition. The 13th International
Architecture Biennale Exhibition, until November 25th is directed by
David Chipperfield. Entitled Common
Ground it consist of a
single exhibition through the Central Pavilion at the Giardini and the
Arsenale: David Chipperfield presented an exhibition with 69 projects, by architects,
photographers, artists, critics and scholars. Many of them responded to his
invitation with original proposals and installations expressly created for this
Biennale, involving in their projects other colleagues with whom they share a
Common Ground. There are a total of 119
participants.
Above. The Central Pavilion, La Biennale at the Giardini.
Central Pavilion La
Biennale: Alison Crawshaw – The Politics of Bricolage. The works engage with the diverse and endemic
phenomenon of ‘abusivismo edilizio’ (unlawful building) in Rome. Since 1945, more than 28 percent of the built
area of the city has been built without planning permission. Together, the works exhibited, present the phenomenon
from the sky and from the ground. A
film, Flight Over the Toponimis, comprises aerial footage taken from a
helicopter documenting the latest phase of unregulated construction in the
periphery of the city. It is presented
within an addition to the entrance of the Central Pavilion. The Big Balcony. This installation is an over-scaled reference
to the boxing in of balconies prevalent across Rome, representing the most
ubiquitous form of illegal construction.
Central Pavilion La
Biennale: Silver Lion - Grafton Architects (Yvonne Farrell
and Shelley McNamara) – Architecture as New Geography. The Silver Lion of the International
Exhibition Common Ground was awarded to Grafton Architects (Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara) as a
promising and emerging practice. For their impressive presentation of a new
University campus in Lima, connecting to the ideas of Paulo Mendes da Rocha.
The jury believes that the conceptual and spatial qualities of this
installation demonstrate the considerable potential of this architectural
practice in reimagining the urban landscape.
Central Pavilion La
Biennale: Steve Parnell – Architecture Magazines: Playgrounds and Battle
Grounds. Academic and architect Steve
Parnell has committed years to researching architecture magazines as a social
and intellectual common ground for architecture, charting their influence on
architects, and vica versa, through the 20th century. For the Venice Biennale, Parnell has
broadened his research to four seminal magazines, each of which still publishes
today, and traces the extraordinary ways these magazines have bound together
groups of people during key periods of architectural history.
Charts on the walls
trace the relationship of individuals, institutions and the press through
history, and the original magazines have been carefully gathered together so
visitors can read for themselves how these relationships played out in print. The room is intended as a reading room,
placed just a door away from the Biennale’s own archive and emphasizing how
magazines have been one of the key media through which architectural ideas and
disciplinary networks are propagated.
Venice in Peril’s
John Millerchip
Central Pavilion La
Biennale: Crimson Architectural Historians -
The Banality of Good. The Banality of
Good exhibition is a strident critique of the trajectory of urban planning in
the 20th and 21st centuries, and an elegy for the time
when architecture and urban design was developed alongside optimistic social
ideas Dutch architectural historians Crimson chart a historical shift from the
idealistic urban plans of the modern period, which were founded on clear
communitarian ideals, to today’s new towns, where ideals of emancipation,
social equality and progress are wholly absent.
This exhibition
argues that while today’s new towns, across the world, are formally similar to
modern ones, they embody diametrically opposed ideas, replacing concepts of the
just, the moral and the good with an efficiency, expediency and individual
choice.
Central Pavilion La
Biennale: Fulvio Irace – Facecity. Facecity is an interpretation of Common Ground
that uses postwar Milan as a perfect case study. The starting point is the city as a work of
collective work: a palimpsest of facades built by many architects who acted as
an intellectual and creative collectivity, like a dialogue among many voices
somehow according one to the others. The
main issue is on the theme of the façade as an urban contribution to a shared
landscape that deals with modernity, lightness, optimistic confidence in a
viable future. Each building is an
effort in defining the public ‘face’ of new classes that emerged in the postwar
as actors of urban regeneration. The
issue was taken by Milanese architects (Caccia Dominioni, Ponti, Gardella,
Magistretti, Mangiarotti, Morassutti, Asnago and Vender) as filed for
confrontation: the common ground was the shaping of the condominium as the new
format for housing in the modern metropolis.
The photographs are by Pino Musi.
Above. Critic and
curator Fulvio Irace is being interviewed.
Above. A video by Francesca Molteni shows her
interviewing project designers C+S, Carlo Cappai and Maria Alessandra Segantini,
who explain their idea of continuity.
Central Pavilion La
Biennale: Muf Architecture/Art, Jane Da
Mosto, Michela Scibilia – Parallel Operations.
London-based architecture and art practice Muf used the opportunity of
the Biennale to initiate a conversation between groups of people from
Whitechapel, in East London, all of whom live or work near Altab Ali Park, a
public space project Muf designed and recently completed. For Muf, the city’s common ground should
always accommodate difference, rather than suppress it in favor of consensus or
homogeneity. Whitechapel is a part of
London that exemplifies a place where ‘common ground’ is in a state of constant
flux, and Altab Ali Park is a case study of overlapping, expired and
deliberately erased cultural identities.
Present in the discussion (and represented in the space by shelves of
books) are educationalists, Lutherans, Muslims, secular Bangladeshis,
anarchists, academics, activists and other who use the park and form the rich
social topography of this part of the city.
Jane Da Mosto and
Muf’s Liza Fior
Central Pavilion La
Biennale: Diener and Diener – Gabriele Basilico. The installation takes the Biennale gardens
themselves as an intellectual common ground and locus of discourse about
architecture. But instead of reflecting
on the content of past exhibitions, Diener and Diener has commissioned a series
of new pieces of critique and commentary about the pavilions themselves, the
architectural settings for the Biennale’s exhibits. Gabriele Basilico has collaborated in this
installation through a special series of large-scale photographic works, which
record the buildings; these are curated here by Adele Re Rebaudengo.
Dutch archistar Rem
Koolhaas
Marva
Griffin
Architects
Kristian Koreman and Peter Haasbroer
Architecture Biennale: Japan - Golden Lion for the Best National
Participation. The Golden
Lion for the Best National Participation, which captures the spirit of Common
Ground, was awarded to the Japanese
Pavilion in which leading international architect Toyo Ito collaborated with younger
architects and with the local community to address in a practical and
imaginative way the design of a new center for a region devastated by a national
disaster. “The presentation and the
storytelling in the Pavilion are exceptional and highly accessible to a broad
audience. The jury was impressed with the humanity of this project.” The jury
declared.
Japan – Architecture,
Possible here? Home-for All. By means of
plastic art and photography, spectators will get to know the protagonists and
the diverse phases of the project called Home-for-All. From huge scale testimonials of the desolate,
confused landscapes of post-tsunami Japan, we go on to the precision models
conceived by a team of architects and inhabitants of the zone ravaged by the
earthquake. A temporary installation for an equally ephimeral project, which
intends to soothe the nostalgia of ruined places which are waiting to be
rebuilt.
Architecture possible here? Home-for-All: Naoya Hatakeyama; Kumiko Inui; Sou Fujimoto; Akihisa Hirata
Commissioner: Toyo Ito. Deputy Commissioners: Atsuko Sato, Tae Mori.
Archistar Toyo Ito “Since
the modern period, architecture has been rated highest for its
originality. As a result the most primal
themes, why a bulding is made, and for whom, have been forgotten. A disaster zone where everything is lost
offers the perfect opportunity for us to take a fresh look, from the ground up,
at what architecture really is.” Ito wrote.
Architecture Biennale: U.S.A. - Special Mention. A Special Mention goes to the United States of America for
‘SpontaneousInterventions: Design Actions for the Common Good’. This
interactive installation impressed the Jury with its celebration of the power
of individuals to change society in small but effective ways. The
unpretentiously simple presentation was a delight.
Above: The courtyard. The courtyard is, in fact, an
open living room, in which it is possible to stop and discuss, exchange
opinions and experiences and begin to get closer to the exhibition.
U.S.A. -
SpontaneousInterventions: Design Actions for the Common Good. A system of self
propelled banners, positioned inside the pavilion, upon which run 124 testimonies
of micro-interviews created on U.S. territory from planning studies, artists
and, above all, American citizens who have reacted to the contemporary urban
situation.
U.S.A. -
SpontaneousInterventions: Design Actions for the Common Good. The floor of the
installation.
SpontaneousInterventions: Design Actions for the Common Good. Commissioner/Curator: Cathy Lang Ho. Curators: Ned Cramer, David van der
Leer. Deputy Curators: Paola
Antonelli, Anne Guiney, Zoe Ryan, Michael Sorkin.