The most unusual move was invented by the Croats, and it is extremely unfortunate that it did not work out. 14 prominent architects - including Sasha Begović, Pero Vuković, Marko Dabrović - were entrusted with the design of the floating pavilion: the result was a structure of 30 tons of Q-385 wire mesh, the complex structure of which is visible only to the light. It was built on a barge and sent on it to Venice, where it was supposed to be in the days of the opening day.
Unfortunately, during the journey through the Adriatic, the pavilion partially collapsed, so upon arrival in Italy, it was sent back almost immediately. As a result, visitors had to be content with a small Croatian exhibition at the Arsenal, telling about this wonderful project. However, the organizers promise to return to Venice with the restored pavilion: after all, there is still time - the Biennale will last until the end of autumn.
The Belgian participants dedicated their exposition to the topic of wear in architecture and interior design: materials, household items, and various accessories. The traces left by the use of many people for a long time give the space a humanity and make it unique. The curators arranged pieces of carpet, plywood, stair railings, rubber rugs in the minimalist interiors of their pavilion as exhibits requiring respectful attention: as a result, the striking resemblance of the exhibition to a museum of modern art became apparent - a kind of second semantic layer in the organizers' plan.
However, even without pseudo-actual art, there were many "artistic" participants at the architectural biennale. This is especially true for the pavilion of the PRC, where a "meeting in architecture" was interpreted as a "business date" between people with their needs, aspirations and desires, and buildings that influence human behavior through their functional program.
Despite a small section devoted to spaces and projects, sculptures and installations took the main place, including those created by the architect Pei Zhu. The most spectacular of these was the work "Wall / Wind" by Fan Yue and Wang Chao Ge, with transparent plastic birds fluttering over the "air curtain."
In the pavilion of Egypt, despite the nominal participation of architects, the main place was occupied by a huge golden installation, which looks like a sea wave, covered with Arabic script, and covers a mummy-like figure. It was complemented by video art and painting. The theme of the exposition was “Salvation”, understood as interaction with the sacred text.
Polish participants presented an equally conceptual project - "Emergency exit". This neon-lit and submerged in artificial fog (“clouds”) construction of birdcages, as conceived by the pavilion curators, should serve as a symbol of “unsafe” urban spaces, where a person goes beyond the field of action of rules and prohibitions regulating his well-being. It can be ruins, rooftops, black markets - potential places of accidents and even catastrophes, but also a territory of freedom.
The authors of the Luxembourg Pavilion's exposition turned to the metaphysical concepts that define the life of an architect and his creations: fragility (denoted by a kettlebell and a glass vase), the routine of everyday life (many cups of coffee with a piece of sugar hanging over each of them) and its elusive value (cozy salon, where visitors can communicate), as well as consumer society, cultural environment and much more.
However, the curators, unlike many of their colleagues from other countries, openly declare that this is not an architectural exhibition.
On the contrary, upon closer examination, the exposition of the Slovenian pavilion, dedicated to the works of two landscape bureaus, AKKA and studiobotas, turns out to be quite architectural. However, detailed information about them, as well as numerous essays on the meeting of city, man and nature (the exhibition is called "All Shades of Green"), discussions about the quality and essence of space, interspersed with beautiful photographs by Peter Koštrun and quotes from Marguerite Jursenar, Gabriel García Márquez, Alexander Calder - all this can be found only on the pages of the catalog. Only a small part of the pavilion fit into the modest premises, and it looks more like a set of art objects than an architectural exhibition of models and plans. Cypriot curators also took a great interest in playing with familiar architectural images: they “glued” panoramas that did not exist in reality from photographs of buildings of recent years. Placed in lightboxes, these images are interpreted by the authors as an "architectural feature film." In this case, we are talking not only about the meeting of the viewer with the architecture and visitors to each other, but also an unexpected “meeting” of different buildings in the space of a “fake” photograph.
Whereas many of the Biennale participants have turned - instead of or alongside architecture - to the visual arts, the Uruguay Pavilion has more to do with literature. Its exposition "5 stories, 5 buildings" is dedicated to 5 iconic buildings of the XIX-XX centuries, namely: a dam, a massacre, a residential building in Montevideo, which for 7 years was the tallest building in Latin America, the stadium of the first World Cup and one of the early modernist buildings in Uruguay. They are presented in the form of poems dedicated to them, quotes from prominent people, etc., as well as in the form of short films. However, the central place in the room is occupied by a carpet made from the skin of a black and white cow, a copy of the carpet donated to Le Corbusier in 1929 by Victoria Ocampo during his visit to Buenos Aires and replaced as it wears out with another one sent by his other friends from Argentina. This carpet, whose history is set forth in the form of quotes from the letters of the great architect, concludes the exhibition as "a place for doing nothing."
Portugal has relied entirely on the power of cinema. Four directors directed for the Biennale based on a short film about an apartment building by one of four authors: Álvaro Siza Vieira, Bureau Manuel and Francisco Aires Mateus, João Luis Carrillo da Graça Carrão da Luís and Ricardo Bak Gordon. These are all completely different buildings: three of them are private residences in the city and in the countryside, the fourth is social housing, built by Siza in the 1970s and expanded several years ago, so the stories about them turned out to be completely different. What attracts most of all is the film about the seaside "villa" of Ayres Mateusha, consisting of four primitive houses with sand floors: it tells about a young man who gets there on a summer evening in the car of a local resident, and then invites this old man to have dinner at his house; the tape ends with a view of the sunset sky and the sounds of an accordion. Perhaps this is one of the most successful examples of the transfer of an architectural image throughout the Biennale. But if we talk about successes, it is necessary to say about failures: the national exposition of Iran, which this year for the first time participates in the Venice Biennale, causes disappointment. It is dedicated to gardening art and consists of a small number of low-quality photographs of the best medieval Iranian gardens, complemented by a primitive installation on the theme of an archetypal garden.
The Scandinavian pavilion leaves an ambiguous impression: it is partially devoted to the problem of public space (tablets with the best national projects selected by the architectural museums of Finland, Norway and Sweden are placed on the walls), but the hall is essentially not occupied with anything else.
Twelve start-up workshops from three countries will work in it in turn, each of which will create its own space for creativity there.
The Irish participants prepared a not entirely practical and visual, but undoubtedly elegant exhibition: they showed in Venice the archive of the honored bureau de Blacam and Meagher in the form of large-format copies of 9,000 sheets, collected in five huge piles in the interior of the Church of San Gallo next to St. Mark's Square … Visitors can take their favorite sheets with them, rolling them into a roll and securing them with a specially prepared ring. This installation, rather than an exhibition, embodies the idea of an archive and its role in the work of an architect.
The pavilions of the USA and Hong Kong seem a little chaotic. The first is more organized: it shows, using the example of 7 workshops, different methods of working in the urban space, which are united by practicality and even pragmatism. They are very different bureaus: for example, hotel builders John Portman & Associates - and almost theorists Terreform, so it seems a little far-fetched to combine them in one exhibition.
The Hong Kong Exhibition is located directly opposite the Arsenal entrance. Its name sounds unambiguous: Architetture quotidiane: Hong Kong a Venezia. This translates roughly as "everyday architecture"; in the English version, architecture is plural and can be understood as “everyday life of different architectures”. The pavilion contains as many as 12 projects, divided into functional sectors (education, clothing, food, recreation, etc.). The thirteenth part is the most sonorous: the competition projects for the West Kowloon Cultural District, developed by Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster and Rocco Im.
Some parts of the exposition are very successful, like, for example, a photo collage of many pictures of typical Hong Kong apartments, striking in their crowdedness and the resulting clutter, or the combination of photographs and models in a project dedicated to 'urban-rural ecology', but otherwise from such excessive ' fullness”the exposition significantly loses its meaning.
