Valerio Olgiati, “Perm Museum XXI,” Perm, Russia, 2008.
This year’s Golden Lion, however, went to the deserving young Japanese architect Junya Ishigami, a former SANAA employee and disciple. His barely-there installation, aptly titled “Architecture as Air,” is more of a manifesto than an actual building, even if it consists of super thin carbon fiber pillars and very real dimensions of 14 meters by 4 meters (about 46 feet by 13 feet). Meant to explore “a new form of transparency that goes beyond the density and opacity of a building’s structural components,” Ishigami’s proposal breezily summarizes the exhibition’s overall aim: to encourage architects to return to the essence of architecture and think freely beyond economic constraints and commercial forces. It serves as a reminder that one has to be able to dream in order to find solutions for the very real architectural concerns of today.
Walter Niedermayr, “Shiraz, Iran” 2006.
Now that the three-day frenzy of the Venice Architecture Biennale opening weekend is over Cheap Coach Factory Outlet Online, and all the journalists and big-name architects have left the lagoon, it’s time to take a closer look at the exhibition and this year’s winners — and to let the general public cast their vote. The biennale committee’s decision to ask the Japanese architect (and this year’s Pritzker Prize winner) Kazuyo Sejima of SANAA to be the director of its 12th installment certainly was an interesting one. Sejima herself is the first to point out in interviews that the combination of a woman director (a first) and an Asian director (also a first) must have felt particularly right for a time when people are looking for alternatives to the gold-rush mentality and its male protagonists, who dominated architecture throughout most of the Noughties. Even the mention of people in the title of the exhibition, “People Meet in Architecture,” is a first in the history of the architecture biennale. Of the exhibition, Sejima said in her own few words that it will have “multiple viewpoints rather than 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.”
The photographer Walter Niedermayr, who is from South Tyrol and has photographed many SANAA buildings, showed dreamy large-scale photographs of public architecture in Iran, finding poetry in what is considered by many a hostile environment. And even reinforced concrete shows its ethereal qualities in an installation by the Spanish architects Antón Garcia-Abril and Ensamble Studio, who managed to make two gigantic I-beams placed on top of each other appear like a delicate exercise of lightness and balance. Equally striking were a strip of translucent concrete by Peter Ebner and Friends that is barely noticeable at the very tip of the Arsenale gardens, tucked away next to Piet Udolf’s magically choreographed wildflower arrangements Virgin Gardens, and an installation by the Brussels architects OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen (who were responsible for the Belgian pavilion in 2008) and the photographer Bas Princen. Together, they won the Silver Lion for “promising young participants.”
Takashi Homma Junya Ishigami
The change in tone is immediately perceptible as one enters the Arsenale, the former hub of the imperial Venetian navy, which is the main exhibition space during the Biennale and over which Sejima exerted most of her uncompromising vision. To begin with, each hall (which can be up to 60 feet wide and 500 feet long) is dedicated to a single exhibitor, an unknown generosity to participants of previous Biennales. This spatial openness lets the different projects really act on the visitors and allows them to immerse themselves in them, rather than rushing by or through. In addition Cheap Coach Factory Outlet Online, some of the projects are participatory. Cloud Spaces, by Trassolar & Tetsuo Kondo, is a delicate undulating steel ramp onto which visitors walk up high into the space through a cloud of saturated air and condensation droplets. “If Buildings Could Talk Part 1” is Wim Wenders’s 10-minute, 3-D film, complete with appropriate glasses, about the airy Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne, Switzerland, which was designed by SANAA — a surprising case of self-congratulation by the biennale’s director, albeit a forgivable one. In Olafur Eliasson’s installation Split Second House, he created stroboscope-lit water structures made of splashes against the backdrop of a dark Cheap Coach Factory Outlet Online, cavernous room – leaving visitors gaping at its beauty, and refreshingly wet in the Venice heat. But what really permeates the entire exhibition is a sense of poetic sobriety, and there was undeniably something dreamlike about most of the installations, in the way they dealt with the elements and enveloped the senses. Take for example Janet Cardiff and Geiorge Bures Miller’s sound installation “The Forty Part Motet,” in which the artists reworked Thomas Tallis’s “Spem in alium nunquam habui” from 1573, playing each voice from the choir through an individual speaker, creating an intense 14-minute experience of music and space. The Swiss architect Valerio Olgiati shows a selection of building projects that in the hands of any other architect would have been monumental, but which he somehow injects with an almost impossible serenity and lightness.
Transsolar + Tetsuo Kondo, “Cloud Spaces.”
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