Spain: interior in interior
The Spanish Pavilion features twelve interiors created by Spanish architects over the past three years. To support the curatorial theme in each of them - a miniature collection of analogies of 20th century architecture, which inspired or could be inspired by the authors of modern works; some prototypes are very distantly similar.
Another thing is more interesting - when we enter, we seem to find ourselves inside a children's three-dimensional book (however, made with all seriousness). Each interior is represented by a photograph of approximately two meters in height, pasted in the corner on two walls, part of the floor and even forming a small triangle of the ceiling at the top. The authors' promise that viewers can partly feel themselves inside each of the interiors is justified; and when moving between stands, something akin to the effect of a spatial jump even occurs - real space interacts with the drawn one. The orange circles on the floor with the names of the objects indicate the point at which all perspective lines within the photo converge.
The technique seems to be borrowed from the Venetian churches, where you can find a similar painting-"trick", only on the ceiling: for example, the second is so painted the second tier of the Church of San Martino, standing not far from the Arsenal.
USA: America to the world
The exposition of the US pavilion is called OfficeUS and imitates the office of a large international company. Therefore, half of the space is filled with desks, while the exhibition itself is located on the walls: a gigantic library of brochures dedicated to buildings built by American architects abroad over the past hundred years. It is easy to guess that this list is more than impressive; it also contains the NBBJ towers from the Moscow City. For a snack - a small attraction in a small walk-through room between the halls there is a wide cylinder, outwardly granite, everyone cautiously bypasses it, but in fact it is an ottoman, you can sit on it. It is possible that it symbolizes the softness and comfort of the harsh-looking American architecture.
officeus.org
Hungary: wooden architecture festival
The Hungarian pavilion is dedicated to the practice of festivals of temporary (mostly wooden) objects, which is well known to Russian viewers through the example of "Cities", "ArchFerma", "Bukharta" and others.
The authors call this activity the "Carpathian basin model", consider it, first of all, one of the forms of higher architectural education and elevate it to the ethnocultural features of the region, to the huts and adobe huts of Hungarian peasants https://2014.biennale.hu/en / primal-buildings /.
The map, combined with the chronology of festivals, convinces first of all by the number of festivals, the first of which appears in 1977 in the city of Tokai; most of all festivals took place (from 1982 to 2001) in Vysehrad. The number grows exponentially.
The wooden structure in the middle of the pavilion, as well as the nine (!) Benches built by the Hungarians in Giardini, serve as living examples.
2014.biennale.hu/en
Czechoslovakia: return to family home
The theme proposed by Rem Koolhaas is carefully disclosed: the exposition is dedicated to residential construction. Over the past 100 years, 200 million square meters of housing have been built in Czechoslovakia (this is 90% of all housing ever built in the Czech Republic and Slovakia). More than 60% of them are apartment buildings, so the last century can be safely considered “the history of housing,” the authors declare and illustrate their simple thesis with a bronze model, where the conditional late house, as the largest, turns out to be below, and a typical house of 1918-1945 - at the very top. The chronology thus turns out to be inverted, but there is nothing to be done: if you put the tower upside down, it will fall.
Curiously, the conceptual pyramid of growing residential production is crowned by a family house next to the tower, which the authors call the alpha house - after 1989 Czechs and Slovaks returned to the ideal of private housing. Is the evolutionary spiral complete? - the authors ask. Probably, assuming that from below, from under it, new generations of houses of the next round should grow.
The pavilion is motivated to be empty: since after 1963 the average investment in public and cultural spaces was 2-4% of all money invested in housing construction, the curators invited the designer to work with the exposition on the same basis. The entire pavilion is occupied by a black plate of an interactive map, on which you can walk, but with your shoes off. The text is written with a felt-tip pen on the wall.
Ukraine: Malevich's coal square
The pavilion of Ukraine is a military tent on the shore of the lagoon, you can find it by walking along the embankment from Giardini to Garibaldi Street. Amazingly, this is the only place at the Biennale where you can find Russian text (in the Russian pavilion, about which later, everything is in English). Inside the tent there is a metal ring (a ring of omnipotence?) Taller than a man's height with a "black square" of coal set into it. On the back wall there are three peasants in Malevich's suits, with sickles and gas masks, an excellent illustration to the words about "a certain clumsy little peasant anger" ("White Guard").
From the explication: “We, compatriots of Malevich, who was born and studied in Kiev, his admirers and heirs, offer to look at his works from a new perspective, defined by his thesis:“Invent a world for yourself and live in it”. An excellent pavilion, I think. And when Sauron comes for the ring.
