Dispatches from behind the lines

The Biennale is bigger than the sum of its parts - even though the sheer quantity of ‘parts’ on show is bewildering. They may seem almost random in their variety, but social responsibility weaves through them

Words Herbert Wright

Venice once projected maritime power from its dockyards at the Arsenale; now the Venice Architectural Biennale projects ideas from it. The first encounter is with curator Alejandro Aravena’s own installation, Making Of. Metal strips hang to form an active, aggressive permeable ceiling and walls are completely stratified with piled plasterboards, little films playing on the shelves they make. Some 100 tonnes of waste from the last biennale were his materials, raising sustainability, but more than that, the space instantly resets the mind.

ADN Birou de Arhitectura’s big white box installation Hilariopolis exquisitely reveals rooms cut into its walls, but inside the box are clusters of whole houses

The Arsenale’s biggest space, the 316m-long, 21m-wide brick columned Corderie (a 530-year-old rope-making facility by the architect of the Rialto Bridge, Antonio da Ponte) is a passage of sustained, sheer visual and cerebral stimulation. Sometimes its parade of works seems to come from a fantastic alternative art world.

That blue, glowing sculptural form models Boris Bernaskoni’s Matrex, an extraordinary new monumental building in Skolkovo, outside Moscow. The wall-high negative aerial film, solarised Man Ray-style, shows a Portuguese bridge by João Luis Carrilho da Graça.

The pavilion hut of Norwegian practice TYIN tegnestue and it’s signpost naming various projects

These are examples of the awe that great buildings can create, but on a completely different scale Hilariopolis by Romanian practice ADNBA has cut exquisitely arranged rooms with furniture and people into a large white box. Look through them and you see a neighbourhood of model houses inside. It speaks of a comfortable urbanism, and is magical.

Aequilibrium by C+S invites you to walk their structure and look down on a display of local projects

Practice TYIN tegnestue built a demonstration tourist hut from its remote Molofunksjonnel project in Norway. Its approach, even the look, echoes its pioneering ‘architecture of necessity’ in Thailand and Indonesia that made the young Trondheim practice a wayfinder for community-based, ethical design and construction. Local practice C + S has built a walkable, red, double-spiral Aequilibrium, wrapping around an ancient brick column above a cork floor, showing projects from Veneto schools. Stunning - but slightly wobbly.

Lightscapes by Transsolar and Anja Thierfelder shows how sunbeams can alter and enchant space, but actually electric lamps are used

Beyond buildings, issues from the sublime to the basic are explored in the Corderie. Transsolar and Anja Thierfelder’s installation Lightscapes shines beams down into the great space, as atmospheric as a ruined church penetrated by sunbeams.

It illuminates how such light ‘can endow buildings with a strong identity’, although these shafts of light shine from lamps. Hugon Kowalski and Marcin Szczelina’s Brief History of Garbage is a fascinating, fact-packed installation featuring model pigs rooting in trash — very different to how Aravena’s installation addresses the issue. Perhaps most thought-stimulating of all, Rahul Mehrotra and Filipe Verde’s Ephemeral Cities spans the hall with fabric walls on a bamboo frame, and asks, ‘Does permanence matter?’

What do you think of the show so far? Kowalski and Szczelina’s Brief History of Garbage explores rubbish

This is a stand-out study, dense with analysis, about the transient urbanism of great gatherings. Its film about the biggest, the Kumbh Mela, for which 100 million Hindus congregate for 55 days every 12 years, mesmerises. (One day our mega cities, too, will pass... are they just Kumbh Melas in slow motion?)

Mehrotra and Verde’s Ephemeral Cities is mounted in a bamboo frame

The Corderie turns a corner to pack in a series of national ‘pavilions’ in another long, free space. Macedonia’s No Man’s Land by Skopje-based Stone Design presents no stone at all but a curving shell to walk through, between clustered wooden models, including the Gherkin, Cheesegrater (Leadenhall Building) and GMW’s 54 Lombard Street. What is London doing here, and what does it mean anyway? Apparently, the work speaks of uncertainty and soul-searching — whatever, it is brilliant.

Macedonia has London icons in its curious curving No Man’s Land by Stone Design

Around the Corderie is more. Escalators rise into the Salle d’Armi where Turkey’s contribution, Darzanà, features a reinterpretation of a 30m-long boat called Bastarda, assembled onsite from found materials and much of it hanging from steel cables. After the biennale it will be installed in Istanbul’s own ancient dockyard. It’s a work of surprising beauty, and probably the only work at the biennale that directly references the old Mediterranean sea-links and arsenales, when Venice and Istanbul were top-dog, urban-maritime, power hubs. Nearby, Peter Zumthor gives a taste of his Los Angeles County Museum of Art project with a large model and a curving walkway through coloured clothing travel-covers hanging on two very long rails, all occupying a dark room. This is a curious thing, an artistic installation about architecture to show art, but it is striking.

The Turkish Pavilion suspends a myriad found elements to create an ephemeral, 30m-long boat

The other biennale area is of course the Giardini, whose best (stand-alone) national pavilions we review elsewhere. Serbia’s pavilion also deserves special mention. It was the most minimal, a room without text, just parallel blue slopes like skateboarders’ half-pipes, and a soundtrack of metallic rolling sounds. Called Heroic: Free Shipping, it cites philosopher Alain Badiou’s rebellion as a dimension of desire by way of explanation, but basically it’s just a phenomenally surrealistic and unique space. Plus it has phone-charging points built in.

Peter Zumthor previews his design for the new LA County Museum of Art in what is after all an art installation

Bigger than any nation’s was the Main Pavilion. Like Aravena’s installation interior, its exterior entrance facade is strata of plasterboard, as if to echo the compression of ideas inside, as intense as in the Arsenale. Again, that makes presentation crucial. Two exhibits exemplify this.

Inside Serbia’s Heroic: Free Shipping, a minimalist, surrealistc space with power... and power points

By the simple expedient of completely bathing a room in red, architecture practice elton_léniz has your attention. The room hosts Andes Shadow, an on-going video installation about a 19-building project at Cajón del Maipo below the Chilean mountains, a sort of retreat, school and laboratory for city kids.

This must be close to Aravena’s heart, not just because of location, but also the light, low-impact build resting gently on the land, and the communitarian ethos. Upstairs, practice Liu Jiakun has made an extraordinary show about his West Village sports/community centre block (2014) in Chengdu, distinguished by ramps running around and above it. He’s a serious guy, known for rushing to build after the Sichuan earthquake and standing up to authority, but here his wooden project model is a 3D track for pinballs, enclosed in a rectangle representing its paths mounted on rods, and populated by plastic figures. It is an inspired way to show what the project is about — animating an urban structure with circulation.

Liu Jiakun models his seminal West Village community sports block in Chengdu with fun figures and pinballs

Elsewhere in the Giardini, a not neccessarily corporatefriendly environment, it was a surprise to see Rolex’s shiny white pavilion. Rather than watches, it was showing its Mentor and Protegé programme, which has involved names like Kengo Kuma, Zumtor and (this year) Chipperfield working with young architects. The third arena of the biennale is Venice itself, in some ways a tough patch to push new architecture in when it’s probably the world’s most beautiful built environment already. Furthermore, sumptuous palazzi host key collateral shows. For example, Ca’ Tron hosts Across Chinese Cities — China House Vision, curated by Beijing Design Week’s Beatrice Leanza.

Liu Jiakun models his seminal West Village community sports block in Chengdu with fun figures and pinballs

Ideas for the future house by 13 Chinese architects, as well as Kengo Kuma and Winy Maas, are presented in dense displays. Time Space Existance at Palazzo Bembo and Palazzo Mora is a show including 100 architects and much else besides, including a sculpture by Eduardo Souto de Moura and a photographic installation by Ricardo Oliveira Alves at the Palazzo Mora.

The Zaha Hadid show at Palazzo Franchetti was billed as showing her seminal paintings, but is dominated by models, and an underlining idea to push design and build further into enhanced intelligence and robotics. Patrik Schumaker, director of Zaha Hadid Associates, explained there that ‘it becomes more characterful’. Shajay Bhooshan of CODE, ZHA’s own computational research group, foresees a time when ‘an unaugmented human’ has no place, and until humans and machine become one, the ‘augmented artisan is the interim’, for perhaps 500 years.

Seeing red: elton_ léniz arquitectos of Santiago present Andes Shadow, an in-progress youth village project, in a totally unique way

It’s a diametric opposite to one of the biennale’s best offerings, the Portuguese Pavilion. The island of Giudecca is Venice, where the flow of tourists is a trickle, not a surge, and where social housing by Alvaro Siza was commissioned in the Eighties. The first part of Siza’s project at Campo di Marte on Giudecca was completed in 2004, then works stopped... until now. The reactivated construction site is the perfect location for Portugal to site its pavilion, called Neighbourhood — Where Alvaro meets Aldo.

With its bare concrete interiors, the space feels grittily urban. That resonates with the four projects documented with films by Cândida Pinto, who accompanied Siza to housing he designed in Porto, The Hague, Berlin and here. He meets residents and looks around. In another film, he recalls Aldo Rossi, who also designed for the Giudecca site, but is better associated with Venice for his floating spectacle Theatre of the World in 1979, three years after he and Siza met. Portugal’s exhibition is not just an insight into architectural history, but places the architect with what is missing almost everywhere else in the biennale — the people they design for.

Neighbourhood is the outstanding Portuguese Pavilion show, about Alvaro Siza and four of his housing projects. It features him on film... with residents. Photo: Nicolï Galeazzi

You can even see them in blow-up photographs around the pavilion’s facade of construction hoardings. And as an interviewer on film turns an overloaded ashtray so that Siza can smoke more comfortably, you’re reminded that Siza, too, is very human.

Humans, for now, are what current architecture should be about. Paolo Mendes de Rocha, the Brazilian Pritzker laureate who won the Biennale Lifetime Achievement award, told Blueprint that the biennale is ‘very opportune’. The contemporary city, he said, is ‘not just construction, [but] a movement of the people. We live in a very urgent revolution. That’s the human condition’. And that message is as good a report from the front as any in Venice.