Why Italy? Of course, the desire to pay tribute to the host country of the exhibition, which has been hosting the Biennale for many years - one of the main (and most beloved by the audience) architectural events in the world, benefiting from it, incurring losses, but almost never drawing attention to itself - played its role. most. Moreover, a few years ago, Italy gave its large pavilion in the center of the Giardini for the main exposition, and now places its national exhibitions at the very end of the Arsenal, where not every visitor will reach.
But how big is the role of Italy in the process of developing the language of modern architecture, to which the 14th Biennale is dedicated? What are the Italian foundations in it, in addition to the Venetian embankments-fondamentà, on which architects report every two years about new developments and problems? The Italians, for example, in the person of the curator of the national pavilion, the architect Chino Dzucchi, declared themselves “anomalous modernity”, calling history their true foundation, as if distancing themselves from the participants in the process of “building modernism”. And the Venetians are hardly happy with Koolhaas at all, given the passions that have not yet subsided over its reconstruction.
the Fondaco dei Tedeschi Palace (a medieval palazzo rebuilt during the Renaissance, where frescoes by Giorgione have survived) into the Benetton clothing store: it was planned to demolish a third of the internal walls, install escalators inside and add new stairs. The Venice Inspectorate for Artistic Values (the same Soprintendenza, whose power is almost stronger than the state) insisted on its own: there will be no escalators, and most of the historic walls will remain in place.
Koolhaas has no big completed projects in Italy. His long professional friendship with the Prada fashion house and the as always protracted renovation of central warehouses in Rome cannot be compared in scale with either the TV center in Beijing or the stock exchange in Shenzhen. His relations with this country are somewhat reminiscent of the story of Le Corbusier, with whom Koolhaas is often compared (and who, apparently, in an effort to avoid common places, is practically absent in the exhibition). Corbyu more than once tried to implement his grandiose ideas here, hoping for support, first, in the 1930s, of Mussolini (to whom, fearing competition, local architects blocked access to him), and then, in the early 1960s, of the “left” government, who invited him to create a project for the new buildings of the Venice city hospital, which he had no time to implement.
But, apparently, really all roads lead here, and, as Le Corbusier deduced the need for serial construction from the typified nature of the architecture of Ancient Rome, so Koolhaas saw in the country of olives, vineyards, great art, ancient legislation and civic consciousness, but at the same time - corruption. financial scandals, opportunism and continuous political crises, a synthetic model of the modern world "existing on the border between crisis and great potential."
The exposition was curated by the staff of the Italian branch of AMO under the leadership of the architect Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, who, in his own words, “in order to describe the world, it was necessary to describe the country”. The panorama of all Italy from south to north, from the African to the Austrian border, stretches in a long suite of former rope workshops of the Venetian Arsenal. In addition to the 41st project, one way or another related to architecture, theater, dance, music and cinema were involved in the “scanning” of Italy.
The last, perhaps, of all other national variants of this art form, was the most attentive to architecture and in many respects it was determined by it, and therefore the exhibition demonstrates excerpts from the classics of Italian cinema of the widest genre range - from early neorealism, such as “Stromboli "by Rossellini, before the comedy" Bianco, Rosso e Verdone "by Carlo Verdone.
This exhibition for an event of such a scale draws the viewer's attention very sharply to problems of a socio-political nature, closely related precisely to the flaws in management and the abuse of power. Monditalia is a clear evidence of the real end of the “Berlusconi era”, when Italy, beautifully and non-trivial, with the right amount of optimism, demonstrates a critical analysis of itself, while at the same time accurately identifying universal problems.
Monditalia - "World-Italy" - begins in Africa. The "Ghosts of Italy" (Italian Ghosts, DAAR) once again return, using the example of Libya, to the colonial heritage of the fascist era, when the reconstruction project proposed by Berlusconi, with all repentance for the aggressive actions of the Italian army 80 years ago, again bore the same stamp of colonialism … "Post-frontier" (Giacomo Cantoni, Piero Pagliaro) tells about Lampedusa, a border island famous for its reception centers for immigrants from the African continent, sailing across the Mediterranean in search of work, and sometimes just a peaceful sky overhead. The chronic lack of funding nullifies all the humanistic pathos of the idea of granting political asylum. The conditions of detention there leave much to be desired, and there is no question of employment. Those refugees who managed to either bypass the receiver or obtain a temporary residence permit scatter throughout Italy, working in most cases illegally: from harmless street vendors of fake bags of famous brands familiar to any tourist to drug dealers. As a result, the “right” is calling for restrictions on immigration, and the “left” is condemning the racism of the right. What to do in this situation is a mystery, since, on the one hand, the civilized world must help those in need, on the other hand, in the face of this problem, Italy found itself alone, without the noticeable participation of the rest of the “first world”.
Ana Dana Beros's Intermundia project (a special biennial prize) offers a feeling of being refugees (who, like in many other countries, are often discriminated against), where the viewer is invited to close in a dark space, similar to a commodity container - a vehicle for immigrants. In terms of emotional impact, this is the brightest exhibition project.
The southern regions - the most problematic regions of Italy - reveal the contrasts between luxury and poverty, talk about the degradation of the world-famous ruins of Pompeii, talking about the architecture of hedonism, about the role of sex in politics and the impact of all this on the modern metropolis. Here are the villas of the island of Capri, and the construction speculations of Calabria, and an abandoned summer house in Sardinia by the great director Michelangelo Antonioni.
About also abandoned modern Sardinian
complex "La Maddalena", built for the 2009 summit of the now defunct "G8", Stefano Boeri argues, trying to understand his mistakes made during its construction (La Maddalena, Ila Bekab Louise Lemoine).
Abandoned architecture is also discussed in the "Roman" part of the exhibition. For example, the Cinecittà occupata project (Ignazio Galán) tells about the phenomenon of the “occupation” of public buildings, often of cultural significance, which are doomed to be closed due to lack of funding, which is quite common in Rome, within which cultural centers are spontaneously formed (the most famous are Teatro Valle and Cinema “America"). Rome is ironic about national identity and the commercialization of great monuments, proposing to throw exactly Italian 50 eurocents into a transparent box with an equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius from the Capitol, or to substitute its face for an ancient Roman marble portrait.
The theme of the destruction of the remains of the former greatness is held at the exhibition as a leitmotif, but is devoid of cloying nostalgia, somewhat ironic and, more often than not, carries analytical tasks. L'Aquila, a city of monuments from the UNESCO list, which in no way can rise from the ruins after the earthquake, despite the already spent (rather, wasted) under Berlusconi millions of euros, the modernist ruins of the bars and discos of Milano Marittima - a fashionable resort of the Milanese industrial bourgeoisie of the 1960 boom 70s, or their contemporary abandoned Pesci markets - works of engineering - essentially ask the same question about the reasons for the desolation of buildings, in the list of which the architect's short-sightedness does not always rank first.
The quintessence of this complex theme is the installation by the Florentine group Superstudio (project "Superstudio. The secret life of the continuous monument" by Gabriele Mastrilla) - Italian neo-avant-garde artists - contemporaries of the English Archigram. "Architecture is Lot's wife", which, turning to the past, has turned into salt and melts under the influence of water-time.
The stand of Radical Pedagogies: action-reaction-interaction (Beatriz Colomina, Britt Eversole, Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris, Anna-Maria Meister, Federica Vannucchi, Amunátegui Valdés Architects, Smog.tv, Special Prize of the Biennale). Let us recall how important radical moods in architecture were in the post-war decades in Europe and especially in Italy. 1968 began here with a clash between the students of the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Rome and the police in the so-called "Battle of Valle Giulia", and the largest figures of Italian architectural theory - Manfredo Tafuri, Aldo Rossi, Francesco Dal Co - certainly wrote about Soviet architecture. By the way, at the stand of Beatrice Colomina, among the most important figures, exhibitions, key episodes, we see Alexei Gutnov with the NER group, who, at the invitation of Giancarlo De Carlo, participated in the famous Triennial of Milan-1968. Inspired by the ideas of the NER, Giancarlo De Carlo a little later created a project for world urbanization based on the socialist system.
Two stands of the Emilia region tell about the modern phenomenon of population distribution over the Earth's surface. One is dedicated to the integration of the numerous Sikh diasporas living in the Po Valley (Countryside Worship of Matilde Kassani), conducting their cult rites in the Emilian landscape. The other tells the story of life in the same Emilian landscape of a new high-speed train station, built in the middle of an open field near Reggio Emilia by Santiago Calatrava, and opened last year to connect local small-scale industrialists and farmers who inhabit this leading private entrepreneur. the Italian region, with other economically developed cities in the country.
The favorite of the biennial jury and the winner of the Silver Lion was the stand on "television urbanism" (Sales Oddity. Milano 2 and the Politics of Direct-to-home TV Urbanism. Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation), summarizing how over the past 30 Over the years, television has built a parallel world that has nothing to do with reality, where, however, most of the population lives. Berlusconi again played a key role in all this: it was he who owned the Mediaset holding, which included the main channels of Italian television. And it all started with the fact that in the 1970s, the former (then - future) Italian Prime Minister began his career as the owner of a construction company that was building a residential quarter Milan-2 for the wealthy bourgeoisie, who wants to move away from the not always "attractive" reality of the big an industrial city into a kind of oasis, and politics at first served him only as a support for his commercial activities. The dependence of construction on political events is at the heart of the neighboring project “Z! Zingonia mon amour”(Argotou La Maison Mobile, Marco Biraghi), dedicated to the city of Zingonia, the largest private construction initiative in Italy in the 1960s, where the leading Italian factories are located - its history, contemporary challenges and potential that it does not lose despite all the difficulties.
At the end of the exposition - the project Italian Limes - about the northern border of Italy, passing along the ridge of the Alps. In connection with global warming and melting of glaciers in recent years, it began to constantly change its shape - to the point that the Italian National Institute of Geography proposed to consider it "indefinite in constant motion." At the stand, a special device, at the request of any visitor, can fix the outline of the border in real time on the map of the border section of the Alps. The adjacent layout shows the change in the border from the moment of its definition in 1920 to the present day. This project - the third that won a special Biennale prize - illustrates through a natural phenomenon the ephemerality and conventionality of the boundaries of the modern world, which time changes much more irreversibly than wars.
Monditalia is, indeed, an encyclopedia of contemporary socio-political problems, in the center of which architecture is inevitably found. However, as the exposition shows, she is not alone in this center. The persuasiveness and dignity of the chosen approach (in which the presence of unity is surprising, for all the breadth of the panorama of the selected authors) lies in the ability to critically interpret the present, the desire to find and analyze the reasons, to predict the consequences, to comprehend the various components of the phenomenon, being aware of the potential diversity of possible interpretations. This is precisely the fruit that the modernity analyzed by Koolhaas has given the world.
