The Biennale is being held this year under the motto "Reporting from the Front": it is dedicated to the most acute global problems of mankind and the possibility of solving them by means of architecture. The curatorial part of the exhibition until November 27 is shown at two sites: in the Arsenal and the main pavilion of the Giardini Garden. Despite such spatial separation, Aravena's expositions help (not always, however, successfully) not to disintegrate several cross-cutting themes.
One of them is materials. It begins in the lobbies of both exhibition buildings, where Alejandro Aravena created something like an installation from recycled materials: metal profiles and drywall used to create an exhibition at the Art Biennale last year. This is a clear allusion to the extravagance of our society, where irreplaceable resources are wasted thoughtlessly, often on a whim.
A related plot was presented in Venice by the Chinese Pritzker Prize laureate Wang Shu and his bureau Amateur Architecture Studio: he received the main architectural award for the generally uncharacteristic desire for modern China to preserve craft techniques in construction, the desire, when the demolition of traditional folk buildings for large-scale projects is inevitable, to use their materials as recyclable materials in new buildings. At the Arsenal, Wang Shu showed the results of his research and classification of materials used for centuries - blue tiles, ceramic glaze, etc.
Architect Zhang Ke (workshop ZAO / standardarchitecture) is interested in similar problems. He is engaged in the reconstruction of hutongs - traditional Beijing neighborhoods, of which there are less and less: they were located in the central part of the city, and therefore they went to demolish in the first place - for the construction of new skyscrapers and shopping centers. The second problem of hutongs is that this is usually very dense - to the point of overcrowding - buildings, often without running water and sewerage, so their residents often do not mind moving to a new apartment on the outskirts. Therefore, since the 1980s, Chinese architects have been developing various rescue projects - reconstruction of hutongs: mostly expensive ones, where an entire courtyard-quarter turned into an art gallery, boutique hotel or private residence. Zhang Ke, on the other hand, builds small infrastructural objects into hutongs, and he reproduced one of them - a children's library - at the Arsenal on a 1: 1 scale. The Chinese tradition of scholarship was symbolically reflected in the project through ink added to the concrete.
Norman Foster showed his charity at the Biennale
plan for Africa, where he plans to create a network of "airports" for drone drones: it will replace the usual transport infrastructure, which would be incredibly expensive and difficult to create. In the Arsenal zone, the first experimental module of such a "drone port" is shown, combining local construction technology (raw brick) and precise research of leading Swiss universities, which made it possible to cover the maximum area with one vault.
Anna Heringer, known for her social and green projects for South Asia, showed in Giardini the possibilities of adobe construction, which has long attracted attention as an environmentally friendly and affordable alternative to concrete and other “modern” materials.
Another social theme - housing for refugees - is dedicated to the exposition of the Cologne bureau BeL Sozietät für Architektur: they propose to use for the construction of housing, cultural and educational institutions, office buildings and other necessary structures a universal cell reminiscent of Le Corbusier's Dom Ino - only a much larger one …It is worth remembering that "Dom-Ino" was also designed for refugees - at the beginning of the First World War.
As an alternative to concrete and any other capital housing, research architects Rahul Mehrotra and Felipe Vera show temporary structures in Venice to accommodate pilgrims arriving for the Hindu festival of Kumbha Mela. In 2007, 70 million people came to Allahabad for this festival - a world record for any gathering. And this did not become any disaster: everyone naturally settled in light buildings made of bamboo and fabric, and then went home, and the multimillion-dollar "city" disappeared as if it had never happened. The authors of the exposition raise the question of temporality and “informality” as possible prospects for the development of modern cities.
The Vietnamese architect Vo Chong Nghia is also interested in non-capital: his buildings very often include living greenery, which should mitigate the impact on a person of an aggressive urban environment. He expressed his idea with an installation made of bamboo, rusty pots and living plants.
About completely inanimate material, as well as beauty (which Aravena also considers an important public good) - the exposition of the Austrians Marte. Marte. They expressed their love for concrete in spectacular sculptural objects.
On the contrary, there is no imposingness in the exhibition of the famous figure of the eco-movement Michael Braungart, one of the creators of the Cradle to Cradle standard for safe building materials. Its eccentric display, including even garden gnomes, recalls the source of the green movement - the counterculture of the 1960s, with its home-made aesthetics, so far removed from the glossy image and massive government support for "sustainable development" today. It is not surprising that it is precisely this image and "ecological" half-measures that Braungart criticizes at the Biennale.
Self-made has become a value for the Swiss architect Christian Kerez and his Brazilian colleague Hugo Mesquita: they have carefully researched the favelas and constantly find optimal planning and compositional solutions that may well become a reference point for “civilized” architects.
The Warwick Junction in the South African city of Durban is also a story about self-organization. It was the most criminal place in the city, if not in the country, and policeman Patrick Ndlovu, who over and over again arrested the same characters there, decided that the problem required a different solution. He retired from enforcement and teamed up with architect Richard Dobson. Formed by Asiye eTafuleni and architect Andrew Meikin's designworkshop: sa, Warwick's flyover is complemented by a bridge-market for drugs and items for traditional medicine, which is very popular in South Africa. The profitability of this project exceeded all expectations, and the economic prosperity immediately made the neighborhood safer.
LAN Paris bureau showcased two of its projects in the field of affordable housing modernization - a new complex on the site of a dysfunctional post-war complex near Bordeaux and the reconstructed towers in Lormont - with mock-ups that emphasize the human dimension of their work. The houses inhabited by celebrating, quarreling, resting people are supplemented on the walls of the hall with the stories of specific residents - they tell who they are, in which apartment they settled, what they are doing now and what they plan to do in 15 years.
Studio tamassociati Venice bureau, curated this year
National Pavilion of Italy, within the framework of the Aravena exposition, showed its project Maisha Film Lab - a non-profit training studio for filmmaker Mira Nair in the capital of Uganda, Kampala. In the park, where the plan defines a symbolic route through the stages of human life, there are pavilions made of local bricks.
Since beauty is also a public good, and socially unprotected citizens, as a rule, especially feel its deficit in the environment, authors, known for their special attention to aesthetics, were also invited to participate in the Biennale. The most interesting of such expositions was the installation "The Slit" by Portuguese architects - brothers Irish-Mateus. With avaricious means - illuminated niches in a dark room - they managed to create a very subtle work with which they protest against the exclusion of beauty from the architectural discourse.
Another intangible theme - historical justice - is devoted to the exposition of the architectural school of the University of Waterloo in the Canadian province of Ontario. Lecturer Robert Ian Van Pelt, a historian of classical architecture, was recruited as a defense witness in 2000 at the libel trial: David Irving was unhappy that Deborah Lipstadt called him a "Holocaust denier" in a book published by Penguin Books. the basis of the American-British
feature film "Denial", which will be released this year). Irving, in particular, argued that Auschwitz was not an extermination camp. Since no significant documents about the construction - terms of reference, design drawings, other documentation - have survived, Van Pelt had to restore the details of the order from the surviving buildings, in much the same way as archaeologists examine the remains of ancient structures, figuring out what it is. He was able to prove, relying on such details as the peephole in the door, that the "morgues" and "disinfection rooms" were actually gas chambers. This story about the dark side of architectural design makes a particularly strong impression: the details of the Auschwitz buildings, documents and photographs are cast in plaster, resembling casts of antique statues or evidence of another tragic episode in world history - the "casting" of voids formed in the thickness of ash in place of the bodies of the dead citizens in Herculaneum.