THE VENICE BIENNALE LIST
Biennale di Venezia
Fundamentals
Marsilio 2014
E' proprio nella scelta di un tema comune reale, la differenza con le precedenti Biennali di Architettura.
A ciascun paese è stato chiesto di raccontare la propria storia negli ultimi 100 anni in relazione all'idea di modernità, accettata o rifiutata che sia stata. Cento anni fa era possibile parlare di architetture nazionali e ora non più. Come mai siamo arrivati a una situazione in cui tutti costruiscono le stesse cose? Questa è la vera domanda a cui sono chiamati a rispondere tutti gli invitati alla Biennale.
A ciascun paese è stato chiesto di raccontare la propria storia negli ultimi 100 anni in relazione all'idea di modernità, accettata o rifiutata che sia stata. Cento anni fa era possibile parlare di architetture nazionali e ora non più. Come mai siamo arrivati a una situazione in cui tutti costruiscono le stesse cose? Questa è la vera domanda a cui sono chiamati a rispondere tutti gli invitati alla Biennale.
Biennale di Venezia
Elements
12 volumi
Marsilio 2014
Una nuova ricerca sugli elementi che costruiscono l'architettura utilizzati da ogni architetto, in ogni tempo e in ogni luogo e sull'evoluzione delle architetture nazionali negli ultimi 100 anni.
Nel 1914 aveva senso parlare di architettura "cinese", architettura "svizzera", architettura "indiana". Cent'anni dopo, sotto la pressione di guerre, regimi politici diversi, molteplici condizioni di sviluppo, movimenti architettonici, talenti individuali, traiettorie personali casuali e sviluppi tecnologici, le architetture che un tempo erano specifiche e locali sono diventate intercambiabili e globali. Sembra che l'identità nazionale sia stata sacrificata sull'altare della modernità.
Superstudio
La vita segreta del monumento continuo
a cura di Gabriele Mastrigli
edizione limitata (20 copie)
Tre componenti di Superstudio raccontano la loro storia, se il tono di
Andrea Branzi in una generazione esagerata travalica la storia personale
attraverso una generalizzazione che cerca di mettere assieme troppe
cose secondo un punto di vista oggettivo.
Le confessioni private dei membri del superstudio soggetivizzano una ricerca molto intima, quella del progetto d'architettura.
Gabriele Mastrigli con estrema leggerezza, fa da contrappunto alle storie personali, che prendono forma dal fare dei singoli per storicizzarsi nel lavoro del gruppo radicale più conosciuto.
Le confessioni private dei membri del superstudio soggetivizzano una ricerca molto intima, quella del progetto d'architettura.
Gabriele Mastrigli con estrema leggerezza, fa da contrappunto alle storie personali, che prendono forma dal fare dei singoli per storicizzarsi nel lavoro del gruppo radicale più conosciuto.
Padiglione del cile
Monolith
Hatje Cantz 2014
The best narrative of this venice biennal, an element of architecture, a large concrete panel, is the protagonist of the political and architecture history of a country.
It was one of the first original wall panels produced by the Chilean KPD plant. Donated in 1971 by the Soviet Union to support president Salvador Allende’s Democratic Road to Socialism, the factory complex produced prefabricated housing components. This panel has since been the subject of several political and ideological controversies. Allende himself signed the wet concrete, only for his gesture to be later covered over by Augusto Pinochet, who hid it beneath a representation of the Virgin and Child framed by two colonial lamp fixtures. By bringing together the voices of former KPD workers, inhabitants of housing built with these elements, and invited authors, this book tells the history of this panel, thus making a fundamental contribution to the exhibition theme Absorbing Modernity 1914–2014.
Emanuele Piccardo - Amit Wolf
Beyond Environment
ACTAR 2014
And even if it is not a catalog of a national pavilion, addresses the issue of modernity in an original way, through a story of a collaboration between members of radical group and American artists who first conceived the idea of using the landscape as material to build a research project, intended as interference between urban practices and the natural environment.
During his first excursions to the United States, the Italian architect Gianni Pettena (b. 1940) produces a series of environments in collaboration with artists Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson which staged a veritable implosion of fields: counter-events and Happenings, “Radical” design and Land Art, as well as new technological landscapes and the pastoral Midwest. Works such as Ice House I and II (1971-72) saw the development of a new architectural sensibility informed by the incorporations of art and architecture by leisure time, a bourgeoning youth culture, and the discothèque.
Korean pavilion
Crow's Eye view: The korean peninsula
archilife 2014
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the Korean Peninsula was divided in two. Within the polarizing global and state systems of the Cold War, a society and culture that had maintained a unified state entity for more than a millennium evolved radically divergent yet irrevocably interconnected economic, political, and ideological systems. The trauma of war and adversarial politics have too often sensationalized and over-simplified this condition, reproducing clichés and prejudices that obscure the complexity and possibilities that lie in the Peninsula’s past, present, and future. In the Korean Pavilion, the architecture of North and South Korea is presented as an agent—a mechanism for generating alternative narratives capable of perceiving both the everyday and the monumental in new ways.
The exhibition is inspired by “Crow’s Eye View,” a serial poem by the Korean architect-turned-poet Yi Sang (1910–37). Published in 1934 and influenced by the Dada movement, “Crow’s Eye View” is the emblem of the fragmented vision of a Korean poet who aspired to be a modern architect, an aspiration that was impossible to fulfill under the debilitations of Japanese colonial rule. In contrast to a bird’s-eye view—a singular and universalizing perspective—it points to the impossibility of a cohesive grasp of not only the architecture of a divided Korea but the idea of architecture itself. Ironically, while most of the world is relatively free to visit North Korea and South Korea, South Koreans are rarely given the opportunity for direct communication. Admittedly a South Korean point of view, Crow’s Eye View is a prologue for a yet unrealized joint exhibition of the two Koreas, what we would call the “First Architecture Exhibition of the Korean Peninsula.”
Giulia Foscari
Elements of Venice
Lars Muller Publisher 2014
The metamorphic nature of Venice, a city in which most buildings underwent throughout the centuries substantial volumetric and formal transformations informed by political and cultural shifts, is revealed in Elements of Venice through the analysis of single architectural elements. Developed as a parallel research project of Fundamentals—the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale curated by Rem Koolhaas—the book offers insights on Venetian facades, stairs, corridors, floors, ramps, ceilings, doors, hearths, windows, balconies and walls.“Product not [only] of the mind but of societal organization” the elements are isolated from their picture-perfect context and from the postcard view of Venice that is impressed in our retinas, introducing the reader—through a combination of collages, drawings, photographs, paintings, film stills and quotes—to a radically new way of seeing Venice. Like a camera obscura photograph cuts through the often irrelevant embellishments of architecture to reveal the underlying skeleton of a building (i.e. its elements), this guide will allow the reader to better understand the fundamental transformations that have shaped Venice during the past ten centuries. This city, which for many is—architecturally speaking—permanently frozen in time, has in fact often been at the forefront of challenging the architectural conventions, both during the days of the Republic (until 1797), in which gothic and renaissance styles were seen as carriers of political and ideological meanings, and in the past two centuries when, despite the introduction of the dooming motto “Com’era, dov’era” (“As it was, where it was”), Venice underwent an unprecedented urban transformation.
Place and Displacement
Exhibiting Architecture
Lars Muller Publisher 2014
Seemingly immobile and durable, architecture remains a challenge in the modern world of collecting and exhibiting. From the late eighteenth century onward, divergent conventions of display have been confl ated with urgent discussions of how material culture is handed down, distributed, appropriated, and evaluated. Place and Displacement: Exhibiting Architecture investigates historical and contemporary practices of displaying architecture, whether in full scale or as fragments, models, or two-dimensional representations. Exploring questions of circulation and temporality, issues of institution and canon, and the discourse and politics of architectural spaces on exhibit, the book’s essays discuss the ambiguous status of architecture as an object of display. Contributions from leading scholars in the new research field of architectural exhibitions reveal the centrality of the exhibition in defining and redefining the notion of architecture and its history.
Padiglione Belgio
Notes and Figures
Parte complementare dell’allestimento è un libro: Interiors. Notes and Figures, che raccoglie e ordina il paesaggio degli spazi domestici, attraverso fotografie, diagrammi e testi descrittivi che esemplificano i processi di accumulo e modificazione nei diversi ambienti della casa: una dimostrazione di come gli oggetti prodotti dalla modernità siano in grado di consumare e assorbire se stessi.
L’immobilità dei mobili, o meglio la stratificazione degli oggetti domestici che occupano i nostri spazi dell’abitare quotidiano è l’oggetto della mostra organizzata al Padiglione del Belgio in occasione della XIV Biennale Architettura di Venezia.
Una ricerca antropologica che parte dall’analisi di migliaia di scatti fotografici che il team di curatori Sébastien Martinez Barat, Bernard Dubois, Sara Levy e Judith Wielander, ha raccolto in cinque mesi di indagine a tappeto sul territorio belga. Un lavoro di lettura stratigrafica degli interni delle case che ci mostra cosa significhi abitare oggi, o meglio, come negli ambienti domestici si accumulino oggetti che rappresentano le abitudini, le aspirazioni e la personalità dei rispettivi abitanti.
Padiglione Kingdom of Bahrain
Fundamentalist and other Arab Modernism
George Arbid ed. 2014
The book itself is the object through which to shape space.
Once again in this simple design, Khoury proves he is one of the most interesting talents in the Middle East today.
The intention of Noura Al Sayeh, deputy commissioner of the pavilion for the third time in a row and a brilliant architecture client, was to involve George Arbid and Bernard Khoury as curator and designer of the project, and go beyond the confines of Bahrain to take on a major project that sets out to interpret modern architecture as a dense, heterogeneous phenomenon in the Middle East and North Africa.
EISENMAN ARCHITECTS
The Yenikapi Project
Zuecca Project Space
Through the presentation in Venice, curator Maurizio Bortolotti highlights mercantile trade links between Venice and Theodosius Port in Yenikapi, On the Historic Peninsula, the Yenikapi area helps to bridge the . For its frst architectural presentation Zuecca Projects breaks new ground in its continued research into the unique Eastern- facing cultural history of Venice and examines how this connects with contemporary art and architecture. Internationally renowned architect and educator Peter Eisenman’s work is characterized by a deconstructivist approach, notably in his collaborations with post-structuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida. His interest in the architectural strata of Venice is well documented and The Yenikapi Project draws on the relationship between his projects for Venice and Istanbul.
Padiglione Gran Bretagna
Sam Jacob and Wouter Vanstiphout
A Clockwork Jerusalem
“A Clockwork Jerusalem will offer the opportunity to explore and rethink fundamental aspects of British modernity, beyond architecture,” described Vicky Richardson, Director of Architecture, Design and Fashion at the British Council. “As the Venice Biennale evolves into a global research project, we are keen to make a significant contribution to the cultural debate around the past, present and future of UK and global architecture.”Designed by London-based graphic designers Fraser Muggeridge studio, and featuring four different covers, the book contains a huge array of images, ranging from Sixties architectural drawings to 19th-century poverty maps, stills from iconic Eighties music videos to historic social reforms. It reflects and records the arguments raised in the exhibition and chart the emergence of a particular form of British Modernism, as interpreted by the exhibition curators, Sam Jacob and Wouter Vanstiphout .A labour of love for all involved, the book has been conceived as more than a catalogue, however, featuring essays by the curators and architecture commentator, Owen Hatherley, that propose questions about how the past can inform the future of British architecture. Mark Wadhwa, co-founder of 180 The Strand – this year’s pavilion sponsor – contributed the Afterword. “The book is for a wide audience because it relates culture to architecture,” says Wadhwa. “180 The Strand is about the people and the ideas that populate it, rather than just the architecture, and this show sets out how that has happened in the past and that it should be the vision for the future. And it does so brilliantly.”
Padiglione Russia
Fair Enough
Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design
Fair Enough, the Russian contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale 2014 takes the form of an international trade fair, where sales representatives and booths showcase a wide range of products and services such as a design studio that is specialized in the design of subway stations or a provider of laser-cut ornaments.
“In Russia’s pavilion, we present exhibition as expo: each booth showcases a different example of our modern architecture, illustrated through a combination of historical and new materials, and described to visitors by a representative who preaches the virtues of the concept, provides its history, and connects it to contemporary needs. The trade show runs throughout the first week of the biennale then gradually shuts down, leaving an abandoned post-fair environment filled with flyers, pamphlets and catalogs that visitors can explore at their leisure, accompanied by the exhibition’s audioguide app.Fair Enough is an expo of ideas. Each exhibit marks a milestone in modernization and clears a path for new efforts. Together, they form a marketplace of urban invention – made in Russia, open to the world.” (Excerpt from the press text).
Padiglione United Arab Emirates
Structures of Memory in the UAE
"Lest We Forget: Structures of Memory in the United Arab Emirates" presents the seminal findings of a larger initiative to archive the history of architectural and urban development in the UAE over the past century. With a concentrated emphasis on the 1970s-1980s, the exhibition examines how public and residential architecture, built within a rapidly expanding urban context, shaped the newly established federation and prepared the foundation for its emergence on a global stage.
Padiglione Canada
Artic Adaptation
Modernity is typically unconcerned with the specificities of place, or even the premise of “the local.” Yet in a place with sometimes little to no daylight, temperatures averaging below freezing, no roads, and a people that live out on the land, modernity has been pushed to its limits. The climate, geography, and people of the Canadian Arctic challenge the viability of a universalizing modernity. A host of contextual particularities seems to resist modernism’s universalizing agenda. Following the age of exploration in the 20th century, modern architecture encroached on this remote and vast region of Canada, sometimes in the name of sovereignty, aboriginal affairs management, resources, or trade, among others. However, the Inuit have inhabited the Canadian Arctic for millennia as a traditionally semi-nomadic people. Inuit relations with Canada have been fraught with acts of neglect, resistance, and negotiation. Throughout the last 75 years, architecture, infrastructure, and settlements have been the tools for these acts. People have been re-located; trading posts, military infrastructure, and research stations have been built; even small settlements are now emerging as Arctic cities. Some have described this rapid confrontation with modernity as a transition “from igloos to internet” in 40 years. This abruptness has revealed powerful traits among its people—adaptation and resilience.
Padiglione Danimarca
Empowerment of Aesthetics
The Book insists on new sensuous and sustainable symbiosis between rationality and aesthetics – between architecture and nature. It is a reflection on the fundamentals of the modern Danish society, which emerged in the mid19th Century: The short pocket of time after the collapse of Romanticism but before the heralded Danish welfare state fully emerged; where the poetic interaction between architecture, literature, art, nature and science liberated an unprecedented energy and a belief in a dynamic society hitherto unseen in Denmark and elsewhere.
”My ambition is to present the interrelationship of forgotten, repressed or underexposed parts of the dynamic Danish modernity. Not only in the history of architecture, but also in science, art and poetry.” Curator, professor, and landscape architect Stig L. Andersson
Padiglione Svizzera
A Stroll through a fun palace
Lucius Burckhardt and Cedric Price
Both Lucius Burckhardt and Cedric Price are regarded as among the most visionary architects of the 20th century, redefining architecture as revolving around people, space and performance. Lucius Burckhardt was a Swiss political economist, sociologist, art historian and planning theorist, known as founding father of ‘strollology’ – his science of the walk. He pioneered an interdisciplinary analysis of man-made environments, discussing both the visible and invisible aspects of our cities, landscapes, political processes and social relations, as well as the long-term effects of design and planning decisions. Cedric Price was guided by a fundamental belief that architecture must ‘enable people to think the unthinkable’. His project Fun Palace (1960–61), conceived as a ‘laboratory of fun’ and ‘university of the streets’, though never realised, established him as one of the UK’s most innovative and thought-provoking architects. Both Burckhardt and Price critiqued the traditional tertiary education system and were interested in rethinking the basic concept of a university. Following their revolutionary teaching methods, Obrist's Lucius Burckhardt and Cedric Price – A stroll through a fun palace radically re-approaches the idea of the national pavilion, reconceiving it as a site for cross-disciplinary, interactive, international engagement. Acknowledging that it is not possible to present the complex practices of Burckhardt and Price through a static display of drawings, Lucius Burckhardt and Cedric Price – A stroll through a fun palace aims for visitors to encounter the architects’ archives performatively.
Fuori Biennale
Young Architects in Africa
The Young Architects in Africa (Y.Y.A) competition and exhibition series aim to highlight African projects creativity, and help a rising generation of young architects achieve worldwide recognition. The exhibition endeavours to emphasize the social, environmental and participative approach displayed in the submitted projects, representative of a new way of thinking the community in Africa.The exhibition features the three laureates and nine nominees’ projects designated by an international jury among 194 projects submitted by candidates from 26 African countries and residing in Africa but also the United States, Canada, Brazil, Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Tunisia, and China.A bilingual catalogue will feature all projects from the YAA competition candidates.AS. Architecture – Studio has founded the CA’ASI to promote dialogue between architecture, contemporary art, and the public from the Biennale di Venezia. AS.Architecture-Studio defines architecture as «an art which is socially committed and engaged in the construction of mankind’s living environment». It is based on team work and shared knowledge.
Istallazione parte di Monditalia
Architecture of Fulfilment
M. is a night-shift logistic worker in the Piacenza's warehouse of Atacama, a fictional leading multinational corporation of online commerce. The exhibition follows M.'s typical day, unveiling the perverse logic behind the company's reassuring public image. Usually regarded as an abstract information system, on the contrary, logistics is a technology able to translate, on the one hand, very concrete desires into calculable quantities and standardized operations. On the other hand, the architecture of the warehouse transforms those standardized tasks into very concrete labour. Precisely in the architectural theatre of logistic that workers like M. are finding the possibilities for a new political recomposition.
Padiglione Italiano
INNESTI/GRAFTING
Cino Zucchi
Marsilio 2014
Il volume è un racconto della migliore architettura italiana da un punto di vista inedito. Opere antiche, recenti e contemporanee vengono rilette secondo modalità originali per svelare la loro capacità di unire indissolubilmente interpretazione e innovazione, materia esistente e forma futura. Diviso in tre volumi, con un lungo saggio del curatore sul tema della mostra e corredato da un ricchissimo apparato iconografico, il catalogo si avvale anche di una ventina di brevi contributi illustrati ("cartoline") di architetti stranieri di fama internazionale incentrati sul tema della modernità in Italia.
Padiglione Slovenia
First Space Architect: Herman Potocnik Noordung
The exhibition delves on the fundamentals of architecture by looking at the work of Slovene engineer Herman Potočnik Noordung, the pioneer of space architecture. With his 1928 book The Problem of Space Travel – The Rocket Motor, Potočnik established a first vision of architecture that would enable human survival in dangerous, even deadly conditions of zero gravity.
For the last few decades, our nearby space has been inhabited with objects of various origins - from satellites to space stations. These human “settlements” perform all kinds of functions in an environment unfriendly to humans, yet they join hands as cultural and architectural artifacts.
Istallazione parte di Monditalia
Zingonia...la nuova città
a cura Luca Astorri, Marco Biraghi e Matteo Poli
LetteraVentidue 2014
Questo libro, originariamente pubblicato nel 1965 da Zingone Iniziative Fondiarie per volontà del suo fondatore, Renzo Zingone, costituisce l’ideale catalogo della mostra Z! Zingonia, Mon Amour, realizzata da Argot ou la Maison Mobile e Marco Biraghi per la sezione Monditalia 14. Mostra Internazionale di Architettura della Biennale di Venezia, 2014. La riproposizione integrale e conforme all’originale della pubblicazione è stata fatta precedere da un saggio di inquadramento storico-critico della vicenda di Zingonia, da alcuni stralci di un’intervista audio a Renzo Zingone risalente alla metà degli anni settanta e da un suo breve profilo biografico. Zingonia... la nuova città è una capsula del tempo fatta di buone intenzioni che arriva direttamente dagli anni sessanta, una memoria dei desideri, delle ambizioni e dei sogni della migliore imprenditorialità italiana, prima di doversi misurare con gli errori, le mancanze e gli imprevisti della realtà. Come la scoperta a Similaun di Ötzi (l’uomo del 3000 a.C. mummificato nel ghiaccio) ha portato a una rivoluzione nella consapevolezza della vita e dei costumi dei nostri antenati, così osservare oggi Zingonia può darci conoscenze sull’Italia degli ultimi cinquant’anni, ma anche idee, emozioni, ispirazioni per immaginarne il futuro. Dove non sia soltanto l’utopia a misurarsi con la realtà, ma anche la realtà a imparare dall’utopia.