So far, the Australian Corps has been one of the most modest among the national "offices" in the Giardini. The explanation is simple: the 1988 building (architect Philip Cox, Philip Cox) was conceived as a temporary building and never claimed to be representative.
The plans to build something more spectacular could not come true until in the summer of 2011, during the next art biennale, a group of Australian architects sharply criticized the pavilion and the provincial image of the country, which, in their opinion, creates. As a result, an open competition was announced, at the same time they began to raise funds (for example, the commissioner of the pavilion, banker Simon Mordant, Simon Mordant donated 1 million Australian dollars), and by the 2015 art biennale, the national exposition should be located in the new building.
The Denton Corker Marshall project is a “white box within a black box”: it is a laconic volume, suitable for exhibitions of various sizes and types. The exterior should be more like an “object” than a building: this will preserve the originality even among the densely built up Giardini, where, among other things, the pavilions are often covered with dense greenery, and even spectacular buildings are not always easy to appreciate.
Among the currently existing national pavilions, there are both buildings by prominent architects of the 20th century (the pavilions of Austria by Joseph Hoffmann, Scandinavia Sverre Fehn, the Netherlands by Gerrit Rietveld, Russia by Alexei Shchusev, Venezuela Carlo Scarpa …), and nondescript buildings (for example, Uruguay shows its exhibitions in a former warehouse biennale).
N. F.
