In addition to the motto “free space”, which allows you to choose between freedom, space and their hybrids, curators Yvon Farrell and Shelley McNamara reinforced the theme of history: “within the architectural tradition, time is nonlinear,” says the foreword to the pavilion of the Biennale, modernity.
Monument to Milan contextualism
Indeed, in several cases, curators invited contemporary architects to present projects of colleagues from the past: in particular, Chino Dzucchi, a well-known master, made an exhibition not about himself, but about Luigi Cachia Dominioni, a classic of Italian contextual modernism, who died 2 years ago at the age of 102. … Both are Milanese and knew each other.
After arranging black-and-white photographs of modernist facades along the walls, Chino Zucchi focused on one house, built on Calle Corso Italia in Milan between 1957-1961. You should see this house and this street: this is the center of the city, opposite the Romanesque (though heavily rebuilt in the 19th century) Church of St. Euphemia, the Baroque Church of San Paolo of the early 17th century, and everything in the same spirit, palazzo houses, the street is narrow, fashionable trams run there, taking up almost the entire space. Houses of the 18th-19th centuries are interspersed, as almost everywhere in Milan, with modernist inclusions, and the house of Luigi Dominioni among them is brutal, red-brown, with dark marquises over long windows, with two towers on the sides. A hybrid of a Renaissance palazzo and a workers' settlement. This house is one of the earliest examples of contextual architecture in the city center, it combined three functions: a residential, office and retail gallery on the ground floor, it continued the showcases of neighboring houses, as well as the wings-towers continued the neighboring cornices. Critics of him
recognize his efforts to delicately respond to St. Euphemia Square and other surroundings as successful and subtle, but for the modern look, the building is, frankly, somewhat rigid.
The house is complex, on a complex site: depicting a palazzo from the side of the street, it forms a small but two-level courtyard after a three-story lintel, then grows in depth to 8-9 floors, and goes further into the quarter, molding like a 19th century incomer, that is more than contextually.
But back to the installation: "from the point of view of the Dominioni," writes Chino Dzukki, "each project is a plot in which difficulties lead to individual and fundamental solutions, stimulate the architect's thinking, sometimes giving amazing spaces and forms." Moreover, Dominioni considered it productive both to respond to the requirements of the customer and society - in general, all the difficulties.
It is significant that the building chosen for the installation is a compromise-forced building, perhaps the most, if the reaction to difficulties had not been recognized as the essence of its architecture. Chino Dzukki views the house as a monument - in detail, shielding a pumpkin volume, mini-hall or "cave" for talking about the interior and showing the original graphics, whose interior interprets the "Pompeian red" of Dominioni and thus becomes a continuation of the photographs on the walls.
Social housing experience
This house is not at all old, built in 2014, although it includes the possibility of development, as well as the one-storey buildings that were on this site - public spaces for residents were formed around them. The home is a social housing for former homeless people in downtown Los Angeles, built by a non-profit developer (oh, there are some), called the Star Apartments. The point is not just to provide the homeless with housing, but to make their life full, to initiate a new community; make happy, in a word. It is important here that despite the fact that it is social, it is not 30 floors near the highway, these are not post-war multi-storey fields on which France and England were so burned (I will not mention Russia), and, on the other hand, this is not a cardboard box - a small one house, 6-storey, by the way the surroundings are 1-2-storey; for 102 apartments, slightly less than 9,000 m2 total area, and even with LEED Platinum certification, built from factory-made blocks. On the ground floors there are shops and a clinic. Above, on the roof of the first floor, there is a free space for recreation, and above, the volumes of apartments, 3-4 floors each, are already hanging.
Curators quote from an article by Nikolai Urusov in 2010: in the 2000s, successful architects for the career of architects, the author of the "Star" house, Michael Maltsan, not only built elite villas and expensive ambitious museums, but also, unlike many, was engaged in social housing.
The building is shown meticulously, almost like the Milanese house of Luigi Dominioni: a large layout, layouts of individual apartments that you can "look into" and which are equipped with video recordings with stories from residents; on the wall - a bird's eye view of Los Angeles, painted in the spirit of Zaha Hadid's "avant-garde" painting.
In principle, some parallels arise between the house of Luigi Dominioni and Michael Malzan: low, in the city center, only the first, of course, is never social, and the second demonstrates a modern approach to housing for the poor, aimed at not turning into a ghetto, but To "pull" people into a new life. However, nothing is said about how the approach "works" - this, as they say, is the subject of a separate study.
Unbuilt: in memory of Scarpa
Academic mini-exhibition of the American architect and historian Robert McCarter, who has written extensively about Carlo Scarpa, Wright and Cana. In 1972, for the 36th Venice Art Biennale, Scarpa, who was at that time the dean of the Venetian School of Architecture, curated the exhibition Four Projects for Venice, where he showed projects by modernist masters created between 1953 and 1970 - according to Scarpa, they are not only would not damage the ancient city, but would also make it truly modern - the exhibition was an attempt to promote these projects, to stimulate their implementation. Now it is clear that none of them has been built, and McCarter recalls Scarpa's initiative with a grain of sadness, as if burying it, noticing along the way: critics and historians tend to ignore unrealized projects, meanwhile, they often contain fundamental foundations, which later became the basis for completed buildings at least helping to understand them. Scarpa's friend Luis Kahn wrote with unshakable optimism - “What is not built is not really lost. Once their value is indicated, their request for presence is undeniable. They are just waiting for the right circumstances. Holy words, but proving all this to the community will not be as difficult as Scarpe was to promote his favorite Venetian projects.
An exhibition in honor of the exhibition of unbuilt projects - it turns out some kind of layering of unrealized, rather subtle; not about myself, not about Scarpa, and not even quite about Corbusier, but a sort of deepening into the archive. The attention to Carlo Scarpa for the Biennale is a tradition, one way or another they try to revive his courtyard at the former pavilion of Italy, now the Biennale; this time the curators opened the channel
a corner, also designed by Scarpa, with its characteristic eight of two rings and two large modernist blinds. Done right, it's very refreshing.
The projects are as follows: Frank Lloyd Wright Mazieri Memorial, project 1953, the building was planned on the Grand Canal;
Mazieri Memorial, Lego model:
Vecenian Hospital Corbusier 1963-1965, it was supposed to be located on the western edge of Canaregio, where the railway approaches and where now the Faculty of Economics of the University of Ca Foscari;
Luis Kahn Crest Hall 1968 and the park between the sea and the lagoon on Jesolo from Isamu Noguchi, 1970.
Close Approach:souls of the monuments of modernism
The curators also invited 16 of their fellow countrymen, Irish architects, practitioners and teachers, to participate in the "special section" presented in the second hall of the biennial pavilion from the entrance. It is called Close Rapprochement. Meetings with Remarkable Buildings ": each participant was given a famous building of the 20th century, asked to explore, reveal its essence," and magic, explain how it works, emphasize material features. " It turned out 16 explications and objects, and only one (!) Participants attracted a banal museum showcase to tell about their hero building, the rest built stairs, benches, hung cubist clocks on the wall and fenced off dark rooms.
The Taka Architects were entrusted with the building of a community center in the modernist (late 1970s - early 1980s) suburb of Bogota, New Santa Fe, built by the chief Colombian architect of the 20th century, Rogelio Salmona (1929-2007); the houses there are mostly 7-storey, and the public centers are ring-shaped, decorated with openwork patterns made of bricks. The result is "Weaving": a permeable wall of brick ornamentation, reflecting Salmona's enthusiasm for the pre-Columbian civilization and the authors' respect for Salmona.
Steve Larkin's bureau, comprehending the Otaniemi chapel in Finnish Espoo (1954-1957), built a large, about three-meter wooden model, striving, according to the architects, to articulate and partially recreate in the exhibition space the view that opens onto the forest from the glass altar of the Finnish chapel - the role of trunks is played by bundles of wooden supports.
In the center of the hall there is a 1:25 scale plywood model dedicated to the Jeanne Hachette Center, built in 1969-1975 by Jean Renaud in the Parisian suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine, who was fascinated by communist ideas at that time; here Renaudie's dream of a comfortable space for everyone came true - in a building of mixed typology 40 apartments of social housing in large terraces, terraces - a "gift" to residents, trees on them - benefit for the city. The layout focuses on the terraces.
An interesting method of comprehending cultural monuments of the 20th century, a kind of catalog of ideas for inspiration, but it must be admitted that the sources are more interesting, and the objects are cramped in the hall, they are grouped somewhat chaotically and look like the "younger brothers" of Zumthor's models on the balcony above them, those who have not yet learned how to combine colored wax with concrete. ***
Migrant tips
Most popular topic
is developing in the pavilion of the Biennale the "hybrid" Dutch team "Crimson Historians of Architecture": they write books, do exhibitions and are engaged in urban planning and research. In the red and black retro design, in the Pyranesian carpet on the floor, you want to guess Rome, but Rome is not, and the rotunda plan forms the Danish hostel Titen in 2005, - in the 18th century setting, a series of tips on adapting migrant cities in the image of a “city of coming and going”, But in the Italian version it sounds really in Roman: VIA VAI.
It is necessary to get used to migrants, to reserve square meters for them, to include them in the fabric of the city, avoiding the ghetto; migration is not a temporary phenomenon and will not end; one must become a city of flows. In addition, migration occurs both from refugees and from university professors, mobility is generally a positive quality of our time - this is approximately the manifesto of urban historians. They are definitely right, the successful life of large cities is impossible without the movement of many completely different people, well, Babylon is there, or Constantinople … by the way, they are apparently not mentioned on purpose in order to avoid banality; so that the pathos of eternity really hovers and brightens up the reading of canvases on the walls; but it is somewhat strained and seems more theatrical setting of a well-known problem than a new word. ***
Drawing
Well, where without him. The curators called the Swede to express something in the language of drawing
Elizabeth Hatz, architect and teacher. The large hall up to the ceiling, using the half-tapestry method, is hung with graphics of different times; there is also the 16th century. All walls are provided with detailed painting, for which thanks, and are grouped by themes, for example - Temple and canopy, or Light and place.
Museum Island:freedom of asymmetry and tyranny of Hippodamus
The David Chipperfield Hall can at first be mistaken for an apology for it, which caused a lot of controversy and is now under construction (they plan to hand it over now this year) on the Museum Island
the gallery of James Simon - covered with a screen of the "gentlemanly" panoramic view of the Altes Museum of Carl Friedrich Schinkel, fine, fashionable graphics a la Botticelli.
What is it actually about: here it is, the James Simon gallery under construction:
Going behind the screen, we see that, defending his project, which was repeatedly cursed and radically changed in the process (the feeling is that the curators invited him to give his colleague to defend himself), Chipperfield reminds us of: Winckelmann, who believed that the hippodamous grid of the plan was so beloved, one might say, adored by us now is a product of Asia Minor with its despotism. And free Attica is symbolized by volumes freely arranged in space. Here another panorama of Schinkel comes to the rescue - he knew how to draw! -"
A look at the blooming time of Greece”in 1825, an allusion, according to Chipperfield, to the identity of the Prussian state, which was emerging at that moment once again.
So, there is a free arrangement of volumes on the Museum Island, and denotes there the "anti-authoritarian" urbanistic principle of Attica, but each building, Chipperfield emphasizes, still remains true to axial symmetry, read - enslaving symmetry.
But his gallery of James Simon uses asymmetry, which was also invented by the ancient Greeks as part of architectural freedom - here, in general, a curtain. But an interesting angle: a blow on the fingers of the adherents of the "strict and slender" hippodamous building (and in general, Winckelmann may be right), and, on the other hand, hello to modernists, who sometimes believe that the free arrangement of houses in the garden was invented it is they. ***
Latvian housing
Pavilion Commissioner - Janis Dripe, in 1993-1995 Minister of Culture of Latvia, and in 2006-2011 Chief Architect of Riga; one of the four curators is a graduate of the Strelka Institute Mathis Groskaufmanis. The project, shown at the Arsenal, looks at Latvian multi-apartment housing for about a century and is called Toghether and Apart, which translates as together and separately, but includes a game with the word “apartment” - apartement.
It all starts with the words that Latvia is one of the least densely populated countries in Europe, however, they continue to build apartment buildings in an open field - two-thirds of Latvians live in apartments. That is the honest truth, we recognize ourselves, and we are convinced of this by looking at the lightboxes with photographs of houses in the fields.
The exhibition is divided into four parts. The "Distance" section is devoted to reducing individual boundaries, illustrated by a layout with many open cells and "plasticine" men in them. If you think it's a communal apartment, but not - this part is devoted to nursing homes, which are opened in Latvia about 6 per year, but the demand still exceeds the supply.
The project "Own" is dedicated to the ownership of an apartment and the paradox - you can own it, but you cannot separate it from the house. The section “Promises” is dedicated to the Azara complex of 1929, where it was planned to build 1000 apartments, but 188 were built; the project came to a halt due to the great depression of the thirties. Nearby is the modern Walmer municipal apartment complex under construction, the largest project of its kind far from Riga and its large satellite cities: 150 apartments have been built, 850 are planned. The subtext is whether Azara's fate awaits him?
In a word, the scatter of big promises from 1929 to 2016 is outlined here. The fourth theme - "Warmth", Warmth, is represented by the most beautiful installation of metal box houses that spread pleasant small steam - they denote the notorious heating of the world space. Figures: 3/4 of EU houses are heated and cooled inefficiently, about 40% of all energy is spent on these processes. The model is a fragment of the most popular residential area of Riga, Purvsiems, built between 1965 and 1975: many apartment owners do not allow negotiating and renovating the area, making it energy efficient.
It would seem that the declared topic by itself provokes a conversation about Soviet typical housing and its adaptation - however, there is nothing of the kind in the Latvian pavilion - the curators managed to bypass the Soviet problematic, as if to jump over; of the above, only Purvsiems was built during the Soviet era, but attention is focused on the problem that looks to the future rather than the past - to the possibility of its reconstruction. Yes, in general, this is both predictable and not bad, it is necessary to look into the future. ***
Venetian archives
The pavilion of Venice, always rich and usually dedicated to the history of the city, this time lures with the slogan "Venice shares its archives". Inside - eleven research projects are presented with large videos, which, which is useful, are duplicated online on the pavilion's website. In the same place, at the bottom of each plot, links to materials that can be downloaded are often really archived - we are invited to join the data on new media - on the Internet, shading it with the image of a printing press and typesetting boards from Tintoretto's workshop.
The machine, a real and restored one, is installed in the center of the hall, there are also boards with letters, the exposition design enlarges the letters in the plywood inscriptions on the wall, visitors are allowed to touch the letters, but no one guesses.
All mostly sit on a long bench along the "slice" - the pavilion is already arranged in such a way that it is a crescent in terms of the plan - watching videos, sometimes very effective. The project has, of course, spectacular and well-presented, perhaps two tasks: one organizational - to unite together the work of different institutions, for example, the State Archives of the city or the University of Ca Foscari, dedicated mainly to Venice. The second challenge is to stimulate the kind of thirst for knowledge that is usually associated with historical novels and films - doing to learn more. Looking at all this, it seems that now I will come home, open the Internet and join the treasures in good resolution and with easy navigation. Both goals have been successfully achieved, but then some disappointment comes - not all projects are presented on the network as well as we would like; some links to student projects do not work, much is shown only in briefs. Often you come across closed access, as for example to
the texts of the theses of Ca Foscari. In a word, not yet Google Arts. It looks like a lot of modern database sites, where an attractive cover was made, and the database itself still slows down in the design of the nineties. But useful.
On the other hand, all this is consonant with the design, which accentuates both the abundance of data in the cells and their confusion and not-immediately-readability. The abundance of inverted letters creates a kind of barely structured chaos - and this is exactly what archival data is, this is a barely structured chaos of data - and suddenly, on the opposite wall, obscure material is replaced by completely understandable and spectacular pictures: layers of a growing city, reconstruction of a building or the radiance of a nimbus of Christ from a picture Tintoretto from the Louvre, copied for the interior of the Venetian San Giorgio. The tempting dramatization, perhaps, is even intended to separate people who are inclined to contemplate the ready from those who would like to look for something in the archives.
However, the useful is also found: to fight and seek, find and not give up! - for example, several versions of the 1500 map of Venice by Jacopo de Barbari, for example a good resolution map built into the game by Jonathan Gross, or a variant of Columbia University. Or you can find the Atlas of Arts of the same university - and this is an interesting and developing platform for joint work with a map, several projects are being developed on it, in fact, at the exhibition there is a call for joint work. Indeed, the Venetian Archives, like many archives now, are gradually publishing their documents; among them you can find Austrian maps of the city's possessions. Well, or these cards (1687). In a word, if interest is awakened, it is necessary to investigate the plots of the Venetian pavilion 2018, it is quite possible to find something. Frustrated by the fragmentation of the final materials, one must remember that 11 of them have been collected here, and this, in addition to creative, is a huge bureaucratic work. By the way, it is recommended to save useful links found on the site - pavilion sites, no matter how good they are, do not always live long. ***
