At a press conference ahead of the opening of the Biennale, its president, Paolo Barrata, greatly praised curator Aaron Betsky for proposing the difficult-to-understand motto 'Out there' for the architectural exhibition now taking place in Venice - the most representative architectural exhibition in the world. Architecture beyond building '. According to Barrata, this topic is multifaceted, meaningful and fruitful. It provokes creative searches and therefore the current architectural biennale is perhaps the best in the last ten years. Curator Aaron Betsky accepted the compliment favorably - after which he had to answer the questions of journalists for a long time, explaining that in fact he loves buildings and did not intend to turn the architectural biennale into a branch of the Biennale of Contemporary Art, and also that he is not at all a utopian, does not hover in the clouds and dreams come true.
So, the topic set by Betsky in terms of ambiguity seems to have surpassed all previous exhibitions. Not only that, it can be translated in different ways - either "outside", or "before", or "over". Another word ‘beyond’, now pasted all over Venice (especially a lot in the Italian pavilion) is translated as “afterlife”. This unexpectedly echoes the fact that the curator of the Biennale defined buildings as "tombs of architecture" - architecture, in his opinion, is a way of thinking about buildings, and when they are built, it dies. In Venice, a museum city that quietly sinks under the water, this sounds especially pacifying and, willy-nilly, makes you remember the Russian city of Kitezh.
However, the task of the curator must be understood exactly the opposite - he, of course, wanted not to kill architecture, but to revive it (and the exhibition) in the usual way - by going beyond the framework of the architectural world itself in search of renewal. Aaron Betsky encouraged Biennale participants to experiment, turning to the fields of cinema, art, design, landscape architecture and performance. Experiments, he said, can take the form of temporary structures, as well as images "sometimes obscure."
The latter seems to be an important part of Betsky's concept. Uncertainty is chaos, and out of chaos something new is supposed to be born. Suppose that the main dream of every critic and theorist is not only to describe the observed process, but also to influence it. When this happens, very powerful, theoretically grounded trends emerge in art. Returning to architecture, it is easy to notice that after the enthusiasm for the emergence of nonlinear architecture in recent years, nothing special happened in it, stagnation is outlined. The Biennale is the most influential architectural exhibition, and it is not surprising that it was with its help that Betsky made his attempt to "wake up" modern architecture, to create chaos, from which something new is expected to emerge. Chaos, however, can be different - productive and destructive, chaos of generation and destruction (sometimes, however, one develops into another). Chaos can also be natural, originating from natural causes, and sometimes it is artificial, and it seems that the chaos that the curator tried to create at his Biennale is just artificial. But whether he is productive or not - it will be possible only with time to understand. If that way in ten years this Biennale will be referred to as a milestone - then the idea, no doubt, was a success. If not, then it failed.
In the meantime, we can only be guided by emotions. The Italian pavilion, entirely dedicated to experimental architecture, gives the impression of a boring chaos. There are many expositions (55), saturated with texts and small pictures, which are occasionally interspersed with models and installations - together all this merges into a mass that is difficult for perception also because the texts are very mysterious in places - apparently, for the sake of achieving the very " sometimes ambiguities. " To dilute the diversity of youth experiments, as well as to show how exactly one should experiment, among them were placed the halls of venerable "stars" with the subtitle "Experiment Masters". In one of them there is a painting by Zaha Hadid, which is really very similar to the avant-garde of the 20s, but only a little more ornamental and therefore beautiful - although next to these paintings, a carpet made according to her motives somehow looks too appropriate on the floor. In the other, there are doodles by Frank Gehry, who received the Golden Lion this year for his “life contribution”. Doodles - translated as "scribbles", that which is drawn involuntarily, but in this case also that which is molded, folded, crumpled with varying degrees of involuntariness - prototypes of Gehry's architecture - which, thus, is born from doodles. But the most noticeable of all is the installation by Herzog & De Meuron, made in collaboration with the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei: the spacious hall at the entrance to the pavilion is entirely occupied by a structure of long bamboo poles, to which are attached bamboo chairs, thus hanging in the air. It turned out quite airy and very mysterious.
The exposition at the Arsenal, where Betsky placed the installations of the celebrities he invited, creates a feeling of chaos, not boring at all, but powerful, very expressive, gloomy and frightening. Perhaps this is because the Corderi space itself is large and darkish, the thick round columns resemble a crudely made Romanesque cathedral, but Corderi is longer than the cathedral, and the change of halls at some point seems endless. And the installations are large, they are inscribed on a grand scale in this space, borrowing from it the scale and scope. The “stars” were not invited in vain, each worked professionally, the installations are solid, recognizable and bright - Corderi turned into a series of images - into an exhibition attraction. This is good for the exhibition, but not very good for the curator's intention, because among the manifestos of the current Biennale the thought flashed that architecture-attraction is not very good, and architecture should think about how to make us feel like we are in this world "like at home". This idea - about “being at home” - is repeated many times in Betsky's texts and seems to be one of the main ones. But star installations in no way evoke "feelings of home", but rather generate anxiety.
Another problem is recognition. Once in the Arsenal, the stars did not experiment in search of vague images of something new or different, but on the contrary - each showed that he can. The images may be somewhere and unclear, but their meaning seems somehow the same - all this is a summary of creative concepts, the result, not the beginning, the past, not the future. Frank Gehry is very recognizable: he built a fragment of the facade, similar to Bilbao, out of wood and clay. Concave surfaces are gradually coated with clay, it dries and cracks. This is done slowly, by the end of the Biennale in November, the entire "facade" will be coated with clay: this is how the installation features performance features, which is dynamic, but the look is still turned back - looking at this performance, you remember Bilbao and it all seems large and a spectacular exhibition stand designed to showcase the most visible piece of Gehry's portfolio. The same thing happens with Zaha Hadid - she installed her next fluid form in the Arsenal, about which it is written in the explication that she is the prototype of furniture. But Zaha Hadid has been designing such unlikely furniture for a long time. A similar object was installed by Zaha inside the Villa Foscari in honor of the 500th anniversary of Andrea Palladio; but what is interesting - inside the Palladio or in the Arsenal - very similar things, so what's the point? Greg Lynn added some humor - making furniture too, but from "recycled toys". The toys turned out to be bright sculptures, which, I must say, took up the least space - for them the jury awarded the "Golden Lion".
In addition to the above, there are many impressive images in the Arsenal. The lacy cobweb installation by Matthew Ritchie and Aranda Lush "Evening Line" looks beautiful. It consists entirely of ornamentation - partly carved out of metal, partly made up of shadows and video projection, inscribed in a metal pattern on the wall. What this means is unclear (what was the goal?), But it looks tempting and relevant - now architects love ornaments. Unstudio placed a three-dimensional object the size of a small room, curved like a Mobius strip in Corderie - this object is notable for the fact that you can enter it inside. The object of the Fuksas family, on the contrary, is outlined by a yellow line, which is recommended not to be crossed (which no one observes): these are two giant green vans with small windows through which you can see everyday scenes in stereo cinema format. The Dealer and Scorfidio behaved very easily - their installation compares the videos with two Venice - a real and a toy American one from Las Vegas. It is unclear how this reveals the Betsky theme, but in Venice it looks great and the chairs are constantly occupied. Barkow Leibinger built a "nomadic garden" from laser cut metal pipes - due to the homogeneity of the material and the simplicity of the solution, in my opinion, this is one of the notable installations of the Arsenal. But Philip Rahm drew attention to his installation by the fact that in the first days of the exhibition (I don’t know how later) there were two naked people reclining there, and next to them, four hipishly dressed people were playing some kind of guitar music: the project is dedicated to global warming, but that's where it comes from follows? Out of nakedness?
So, the part of the exposition, designed to respond to the curator's call, consists of 55 small exhibitions in the Italian pavilion and 23 large installations in the Arsenal. All together they add up to an attempt to awaken architects - from commercial practice to “paper” fantasies - for the sake of renewal, turning, in general, the birth of something new. The pavilion of Italy represents, according to the curator, both the past and the future of this process: youth exhibitions - hope for the future, retrospective exhibitions of masters - a kind of textbook on how to experiment. All this is complemented by Bezki's article on the history of post-war modernist experimentation - its origins the curator traces to the political crisis of 1968 and the energy crisis of 1973. Becki names names, builds a story and invites young architects to continue it. The Arsenal exposition, on the other hand, makes the same call for experimentation to venerable masters - in theory, the entire architectural community should as a result be involved in the process of creating "scribbles" - from which a new burst of thought, a new twist, would subsequently occur. So what's going on? The youth exposition turned out to be shallow and oversaturated (although, if you wish, you can see interesting things in it) - and the “star”, instead of dynamics and novelty, reproduced the “stars” own techniques. The impulse to artificially inject creative chaos into architecture seems to have failed. Maybe because it is artificial? Although - as has already been said - only after ten years it will become finally clear whether this attempt has borne at least some fruit and whether it has led to a turn. In the meantime, looking at the exposure, it seems unlikely.
But here's what's strange. It is unclear whether Betsky awakened the architects. But the natural forces, one must think, awakened. It was easy to notice that the opening ceremony of the Biennale, the curator of which in his manifesto stated that it’s not the most important thing in our world to protect ourselves from rain, fell on such a downpour that rarely happens in Venice. Because of this rain, the opening had to be moved from the Giardini to the Arsenal - and a crowd of wet and frozen journalists stood in front of the entrance. But that would still be nothing. So after all, arguing about the importance of economic and other troubles for the development of conceptual thought, the curator of the current Biennale, apparently, not only rain, but also the crisis jinxed. The crisis is obvious. We are waiting for experiments.
Botanists and nomads
While interpreting his confused topic for the public and the participants of the Biennale, curator Aaron Betsky spoke mainly apophatically, that is, from the opposite. Not a building, because it is a grave of human hopes and natural resources, not a utopia or an abstract solution to social problems - but images and riddles to dream of. He called for going beyond building and architecture as a discipline - and experimenting. But he didn’t say exactly where to go, retaining the enigmatic mystery.
Everyone reacted to this mystery in different ways, with cinema, design and furniture. Many critics considered the Architecture Biennale too similar to the Biennale of Contemporary Art and thus lost its professional specificity. After going beyond the framework, you can not only gain, but also lose - this, generally speaking, is an exciting, but also dangerous occupation - to cross borders.
However, the most obvious way to respond to the topic turned out to be the most straightforward: just leave the building. It would be curious if the exhibition halls were left empty at all, and the expositions were smashed outside, but the Biennale still did not reach such a degree of literalism. However, in terms of escape from architecture to nature and construction there, outside, of various "temporary structures", the architects could turn to the rich experience of Soviet summer residents - they also fled from the decline of modernism and, having escaped, set up a vegetable garden.
The largest vegetable garden at the Biennale was built by the Gustafsons. A part of the lianas-covered wild vegetation of the Garden of the Virgins, located at the edge of the Arsenal, on the site of a ruined Benedictine monastery - was cultivated by the British-American project "through Paradise" (towards paradise). Cabbage, onions and dill (symbols of satiety) are interspersed with flowers, in the center of the composition there is a hill curving like a snail, covered with neat grass. The herb snail is meant to be a place to behold, with seating cushions placed on it, but on a rainy day of opening, only white balls hovered over the hilly lawn. Further, in the old chapel (or church?), Candles are placed on shelves along the walls, and the Latin names of disappeared animals and plants are written on the walls (there are quite a few). It must be admitted that this landscape project is the most ambitious at the Biennale. For his sake, they even cut down several old trees, which is not welcome in Venice.
By the way, the theme of Paradise fits well into the curatorial ‘out there’ and ‘beyond’ - there is nothing more otherworldly than Paradise. It is revealed in its own way in the German pavilion: apples grow on branches stuck in pots, droppers with green liquid are attached to the branches. Whether the fruits themselves grew on thin cuttings and how this was achieved is not explained, but the symbolic exposition is accompanied by the argument that people, trying to create a paradise on earth for themselves, are destroying entire ecosystems for the sake of this technogenic paradise. Apples under droppers should probably represent a man-made paradise.
The pavilion of Japan is surrounded by flowers, planted within ephemeral structures that resemble the outlines of towers entwined with greenery. These are schemes of multi-storey buildings inhabited by vegetation - they are also depicted inside the pavilion on the walls in pencil. In addition to drawings, there is nothing else in the pavilion - it is completely white, like a kind of paper sheet tipped over into the interior. Many people liked this laconic and contemplative pavilion in a synthaic way.
The American vegetable garden is smaller and not so profound, but social - it is devoted, in particular, to raising children through gardening (this kind of education is now practiced in many monasteries in our country). The Americans hid the imperial dorica of the façade behind a translucent mesh, set up a vegetable garden in front of the colonnade, and filled the pavilion with all sorts of social projects. A very serious and diverse ‘ecotopedia’, an encyclopedia of environmental problems, is deployed in the Danish pavilion.
The environmental theme is also popular among experimental projects in the Italian pavilion. The ideas, however, are mostly familiar: green cities, where there is a forest below, and technology and civilization "on the second tier" and green skyscrapers, of which one is especially noticeable - Julien de Smedta, a project intended for the Chinese city of Shenzhen, located on the mainland opposite Hong Kong. This is a giant skyscraper, inhabited in equal measure by people and greenery, which, according to the authors, should replace the wooded mountains that have disappeared in this area, becoming a large man-made mountain. No matter what the sage from Cincinnati says about the benefits of vague inspirations, a real project looks very advantageous against their background.
Another way to escape "from the building" is to go to the hut. Oddly enough, he is not very popular, but he is close to us in spirit. The main "hut" in the form of a yurt was built on the embankment of the Arsenal by Totan Kuzembaev and placed inside a small car. The point is to combine the nomadic accessories of two cultures - ancient and modern. From modern civilization, inside the yurt there are various technical accessories, cell phones, laptops, etc., used not for their intended purpose, but as attributes of a shaman. To survive in the modern world - writes Totan Kuzembaev in the explication to "Nomad", you need to adjust. And then either something new will arise, or globalism will swallow everything, which will be sad, he concludes.
On the other hand, between the Arsenal and the Gustafson's paradise, Chinese architects built several different houses - made of boxes, plywood, hardboard - houses are large, three-story, but inside it is uncomfortable and cramped, like on a train. The pergola hut built by Nikolai Polissky on the terrace of the Russian pavilion also fits into the same row - a beautiful structure, but, unfortunately, not very noticeable due to the fact that it is located on the side of the lagoon.
There is also a more abstract way of leaving - for example, from form to sound and video. Here is a beautiful and completely unarchitectural pavilion of Greece, consisting of interactive pedestals with monitors and headphones with the sounds of the city. It is dark with glowing plastic threads hanging.
And finally, you can get away from architecture by emptying the pavilion - this was done in the pavilion in Belgium, where colorful confetti is scattered on the floor ("After the Party"), or in Czechoslovakia, where there are funny refrigerators with food sets for different characters.
Most of the participants diligently interpreted the topic, but there are also fronders - those who, contrary to the motto, still showed the buildings. After all, national pavilions do not have to follow the theme. Great is the UK pavilion, where an expensive, carefully crafted exposition is dedicated to five architects building housing in British cities. It turns out that now in Britain - the homeland of the garden city and new types of dwellings at the beginning of the 20th century - less housing is being built. The pavilion of France is filled with many models: each of them is placed in a transparent plastic box and attached to the wall with a movable console - you can twist the models while looking at them. The architecture of Spain is also shown in great detail and traditionally - with pictures and models. For the first time in many years, this row includes the Russian pavilion, about which - a little later.
Russians in Venice
It so happened that among the people I was able to talk to in Venice, journalists assessed Aaron Betsky's concept mostly positively, while architects mostly negatively. There are, of course, exceptions, but on the whole it is obvious - architects come to Venice to look at architecture, and its almost complete absence was not the most pleasant surprise for them.
In the Russian pavilion, everything happened the other way around: it is not vague visions that are shown, but buildings, many buildings. Previously, when projects and realizations were exhibited at the Biennale, installations were arranged in the Russian pavilion, and now, when it was finally decided to show real architecture, Aaron Betsky formulated the exact opposite “task”. However, the theme is not obligatory for the national pavilion … Should we have discarded the idea for the first time to show a slice of real Russian architecture and adjust to the motto? Hard to tell. But, strictly speaking, it is obvious that the theme set by Betsky for the Biennale corresponds to the situation of a certain boredom and satiety with "stars" that has developed in the architecture of the world. And the theme, set by the curator of the Russian pavilion, Grigory Revzin, is consonant with the situation of the construction boom in Russia. And the exhibition quite accurately represents a snapshot of Russian architecture today. Including the variegation and crowding characteristic of it, the active, vital and not very controlled growth of various buildings.
The exhibition consists of two parts. The upper floor is occupied by modern projects and buildings - it has three halls, one main and two additional. Designers Vlad Savinkin and Vladimir Kuzmin decided them in three different colors: the first hall, which displays the electronic catalog, is white, the third hall - it contains developers, is black, and the main, central hall is red. Its floor is lined with chess cells, the red ones are the buildings of Russian architects, the white ones are the models made according to the designs of foreigners building in Russia. According to the curator's idea, between the models of Russians and foreigners, a conditional chess game takes place - accentuating the theme of competition between “local” and “alien” architects.
The second part of the exhibition is the wooden structures of Nikolai Polissky, not yet architecture, but, as defined by the curator of the Russian pavilion Grigory Revzin, an expression of the dream of the Russian landscape. Polissky's works permeate the Russian pavilion - in the hall on the first floor they form a forest thinned by patches of light. In the same place, in the next hall, the main works of Polissky are shown and - with video clips - the process of their creation by the forces of a well-coordinated team of residents of the village of Nikolo-Lenivets. Based on the first floor, Polissky's structures continue to grow everywhere - in the form of an impromptu arch in front of the entrance, pergolas on the terrace (so called 'beyond building') and even the legs at the table in the developer's hall are made of the same crooked trunks.
It must be admitted that Nikolai Polissky's designs differ markedly from other landscape projects of the Biennale, and not only by the fact that they completely lack the “paradise” theme of a garden-garden, and the material is wild, natural, barely cleaned. They are much closer to nature than ecological projects, which, in fact, belong to a greater extent to the world of technology. Polissky's "forest" is a little wild and scary, although inside the pavilion it lacks scale - there is nowhere to turn around. But you have to understand that this is an "export" forest, a goblin on tour. In Nikolo-Lenivets, Polissky's landscape projects are both larger and more vital.
This year the Russians took part in all the main parts of the Biennale. Totan Kuzembaev, who recently won second place in the competition for a bridge across the Venetian Grand Canal, was invited by Aaron Betsky to participate in the curatorial exposition of the Arsenal and built the already mentioned yurt on the street in front of him. Boris Bernasconi, who recently shared first place in the international competition for the Perm Art Museum with Valerio Olgiati, was invited to curate the exhibition at the Italian pavilion - and used this invitation to fight against Norman Foster's Orange project. I must say that Aaron Betsky at his press conference separately mentioned Bernasconi's project and praised it very much in the sense that the young architect dared to protest against Foster himself.
Having arrived in Venice, the Maternity Hospital exhibition (curated by Yuri Avvakumov and Yuri Grigoryan) turned into a very beautiful project. For the first time the exhibition was shown in Moscow at the VKHUTEMAS gallery, then in St. Petersburg. I must say that at the Biennale the exhibition, which had been invented a year earlier, turned out to be very useful: it consists of sculptural embryos of architecture, interpretations of the theme of birth, produced by architects, among whom there are many Russians, but many foreigners. I would even dare to suggest that here the main idea of Betsky is expressed, if not more precisely, then more succinctly than in the Arsenal. Housed in the Venetian Church of San Stae, the exhibition has significantly transformed: all the exhibits were placed in cells inside the walls of a cardboard house with perforated walls. This building is likened to a church reliquary and at the same time a nativity scene. The evolution of the exhibition seems to be very logical. Moreover, it seems that Venice itself played a role here - a city in which almost every wall carries an icon case with a sculptural icon. From what the city seems to be consecrated as a whole - a quality that has already been lost by other European cities - and even the brutal "Maternity Hospital" here turns into a Christmas nativity scene. Venice is a wonderful city.
