Riding the interminably slow accelerato waterbus to the Venice Architecture Biennale gave me time to stare afresh at the rows of theatrical houses and palaces on parade along the banks of the Grand Canal. If, in your mind’s eye, you strip away the flamboyant Gothic and Renaissance facades, you are left with rows of four-square brick boxes with big chimneys sitting by the water’s edge under the vast skies, which did so much to make Turner’s reputation as a visionary artist when he painted them. What you have, then, is a city that represents the four elements: earth (bricks), air (sky), fire (chimneys) and water (canal).
Unconsciously, this was more or less the theme of the 2010 Architecture Biennale. In an era of financial paucity and increasing concerns about the sensational waste of our capitalist world, its ever bigger buildings and ever more sprawling cities, I had the feeling that many architects from around the world are trying to get back to basics. Not, that is, to lead us into some austere era of rudimentary design and construction, but to help us think of how we can truly do more with less.
The Biennale has been curated by Kazuyo Sejima, one half of the Pritzker prize-winning Japanese practice Sanaa. Given that Sanaa specializes in a form of architecture that might be called ethereal — buildings of great transparency, such as the new Rolex Learning Centre in Lausanne, that touch the ground as lightly as possible — this idea of doing more with less, and delightfully so, makes sense. Sejima has named this year’s exhibition People Meet in Architecture, which, of course, they do. Yet she seems to be asking what this architecture might be if only it weren’t such a slave, as it is at the moment, to overwhelming commercial forces.
The 12th International Architecture exhibition (the first was held in 1980) is a panoramic snapshot showing what architects around the world are thinking beyond and aside from the everyday concerns they have with satisfying clients and wooing planning committees. Held in the Arsenale — the one-time hub of the imperial Venetian navy — and the formal exhibition gardens overlooking the lagoon five minutes’ walk away, the Biennale aims to encourage fresh thinking about architecture at a time of economic restraint, environmental fears and yet limitless opportunities. Here, in the dreamiest of all cities, is a rare chance for architects to dream and play, as well as address matter-of-fact issues of how we should be building at the moment. As Sejima said at the opening of the show, “an architecture exhibition is a challenging concept, as actual buildings cannot be exhibited.” She continued: “As an architect, I feel it’s a part of our profession to use space as a medium to express our thoughts. In this way, the atmosphere of the exhibition will be reached through multiple viewpoints rather than through a single orientation. It’s a backdrop for people to relate to architecture, for architecture to relate to people, and for people to relate to themselves.”
As if to underline this theme, when I walked into the massive Corderie, the old ropeworks buildings of the Arsenale — where one half of the sprawling biennial exhibition is on show — a team of Japanese architects was busy building a house that was barely there.
They were, they said, “thinking of architecture in the air,” whereby “even the structures that give a building its very shape may no longer be clear but, rather, voidlike.” I see. Or, rather, I didn’t, as the house Junya Ishigami and his colleagues were building is made of what appears to be the finest steel threads. Design drawings of the house on the walls of the ropeworks were so fine as to be all but impossible to interpret. It was as if these diligent architects were building one of Italo Calvino’s invisible cities, shaping a structure that might or might not be real.
Calvino was, of course, a Venetian, and the fantastical cities the novelist imagined in Invisible Cities were a homage to Venice itself; the least likely of all cities, fictional or real. Ishigami’s installation, Architecture as Air, is a riposte to the idea of building ourselves into a hell of our own making. I like the fact that this house has precise measurements — 14m by 4m by 4m — as if it might be built for real, and that it has a structure comprising columns, beams and bracing. Yet these are “indeterminate contours lacking true physical form that dissolve into the transparent space rather than structures supporting the building.” At one point, it all threatened to fall down.
Next door is an installation called Cloudscapes by Tetsuo Kondo Architects and Matthias Schuler of Transsolar Klima Engineering. Here, visitors walk up the most delicate steel ramps into artificially generated clouds. This has been done before — notably on the banks of Lake Neuchatel during the 2002 Swiss Expo by the New York architects Diller + Scofidio — yet there is something delightfully otherworldly in walking with your head in the clouds inside a building. All that is solid melts into water vapor, while architectural preconceptions fumble into a foggy state of indeterminacy. Anything might go.
As if to address this feeling, in another room in the Corderie Serpentine Gallery, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has installed a plethora of video screens on which you can sit and watch and listen to ideas about the future from all the Biennale’s participants. Or, you can simply gawp at the scintillating, stroboscopic beauty of the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson’s Your Split Second House, a cavernous, dark space in which whip-cracks and writhing snakes of water flash in front of your eyes, hinting at thrilling structures that could never really be, and are gone before your eyes even begin to adjust to their uncertain forms.
These installations — clouds, invisible houses, ephemeral structures — are, I think, successful. Whatever practical relevance they have on the future of what we build is not really their point; they are things of beauty, or ways of making us see with wide-open eyes. What might architecture, and the spaces it shapes and cossets, be like if we could only think about it freely?
A team of Spanish architects, engineers and musicians led by Anton Garcia-Abril and Ensamble Studio suggest it’s all a matter of balance; to this effect, they have installed two enormous intersecting concrete I-beams across an entire room of the Corderie. These appear to be held in check by a rock and a coil spring, suggesting that the line we walk between self-destruction and a positive future is both delicate and dramatic.
In recent Biennales, curators have been unable to resist the temptation to create exhibition rooms that feel more like the inside of dense academic tomes (indigestible in the Venetian heat) than installations with immediate visual impact. This year, the idea of creating strong yet simple themes and messages has been carried through from the Arsenale to the Giardini, the public park overlooking the lagoon and the lido, well away from the crowds of St Mark’s Square.
This is where many of the national pavilions are found, waving flags for the architectural thinking of countries that have been involved with cultural events in Venice for many decades. Those with a more youthful involvement, whether Croatia or Bahrain, Chile or Korea, peddle their cultural wares in the Arsenale.
The Biennale’s Golden Lion award for the best national pavilion has been presented to the Kingdom of Bahrain for a display of three simple fishermen’s huts uprooted from the coast of Bahrain for the duration of the Venice show. Entitled Reclaim and curated by architects Noura Al-Sayeh and Fuad Al-Ansari, this is a touching display of a vernacular culture fast disappearing in a part of the world where architectural bombast rules. These shacks are elemental and beautiful.
In the spirit of austerity, the Belgian pavilion shows bits and pieces of the fabric of heavily used office buildings to highlight the notion of durability and the nature of wear and tear. So, stretches of rubber-studded floor vie for attention with worn painted steel handrails. It’s rather moving: all those Belgian feet and hands making their imprint on the bulky architecture of the often unlovely contemporary office.
The Dutch present models of empty buildings highlighting the gormless enormity of architectural waste; how we concrete over anywhere we can for short-term gain, while governments prattle on about sustainability and building shortages.
The Hungarian pavilion is a maze of bright yellow school pencils hanging from ceilings by cotton threads. The idea, backed up by touching videos showing architects’ hands — young and old — drawing, made the simple point that, although it’s undeniably clever, computer-aided design in architecture has done little to make us happier or more human. Drawing remains the guiding genius of buildings that touch us.
“What makes a livable city?” asks the Danes. Behind a yellow banner posing this perennial question sits a Carlsberg dispensing machine that, I suppose, answers the question, especially in a Venice that has been as hot and sticky as molten glue this summer. Inside their pavilion, though, the Danes have new plans for Copenhagen. While these portray happy consumers in baseball caps and high-five-style poses in front of jaw-jutting buildings you hope will never get planning permission, it’s easy to see that the city-by-the-water presented here is a kind of would-be Venice, seen through computer screens and digital processes, darkly. If only, the Danes seem to be saying, we could have the excess of our contemporary world in cities as magical as Venice.
The Finns ask us to “stay with the elements” and “close to nature”; the Austrians clearly want us to retain something of the innocence of childhood with models of a city center, one made of flowers, another straddled by a centerpiece building in the guise of a tiger. The British presentation, curated by Vicky Richardson of the British Council and London architects muf, is more obscure. Its professed hope — that we will learn to respect natural Venice as much as we have drawn from its culture and architecture in the past — is represented by, among other things, excepts from Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice and a wooden model of the Olympic stadium currently being built in London.
Much of this Biennale is thoughtful, even wistful stuff, the concerns of generations faced with the absurd contradiction of a desire, on the part of a minority of humans, to lead a “good” life, and the reality of the many grasping for the very cities, buildings and consumer trash that will bring us all to a hot and sticky end.
With a light yet distinctive touch, Kazuyo Sejima has done well to shape an event that raises such issues while still delighting us with installations that hint at something soulful and magical beyond the humorless world of “urban regeneration” and architectural inanity. She brings us back to the elemental in architecture, and finally to the elements themselves.
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