The topic of free space puzzled many, forcing them to react in the sense that the space must be vacated - and they freed it as best they could, but later about empty pavilions. Resigned to the degree of devastation, some countries "compensated" for it - although how could they know the plans of their neighbors! - overcrowding or intensification of the theme of the attraction. Let's take a look at some of those exhibits that were not awarded (see about them here), but are still worthy of attention.
Japan: collection
One such overcrowded but charming pavilion is Japanese. The exhibition is called “Architectural Ethnography” and develops a project on which its chief curator Momoyo Kaijima has been working since the late 1990s, that is, for about 20 years, collecting “observations of the life of people and the reality of cities refracted through architectural graphics”. moreover, reality is perceived not without humor, and nature and architecture are viewed from the point of view of their users - city dwellers. Drawings are collected from all over the world, not only Japanese, there are 42 participants, among them the work of university studios, architectural workshops and artists.
It turns out to be a rather thick soup, more sociological than architectural, but fascinating. Visitors are invited to grab the details and masses of small drawings and installations on the walls using a plastic magnifying glass equipped with many instructions, similar to a universal calendar. Also, in order to examine the drawings above, it is recommended to ask the servants for a ladder, or a cart on wheels - there are almost as many means for researching reality as in the city itself, the main thing is not to be shy. Finally, in the lower space are several yatai carts, a traditional gadget of Japanese merchants, with books and drawing paper.
Holland: charades
The Holland Pavilion was celebrated on May 24 during the preview of the Biennale by the fact that inside, in a room that repeats the interior of hotel room 902, where in 1969 John Lennon and Yoko Ono protested against the Vietnam War while lying in bed, historian and architectural critic Beitris Kolomina interviewed in bed for 4 hours with many architects and researchers.
Lennon and Yoko Ono understood their bed as a "horizontal architecture of protest, work, production and reproduction", or fucktory, and by this it anticipates the bed for work today - professionals often work in bed, resorting to new communications, comments on his curatorial project in Dutch pavilion Kolomin.
The center of the pavilion is fenced off with orange walls with many doors - some of them lead to the rooms formed around the perimeter, some show installations in larger and smaller cabinets. Putting it all together - a set of 12
curatorial projects on the theme "Work, body, entertainment". Creativity and spaciousness make the Dutch pavilion akin to the Japanese.
Spain: an overflow in the making
Spanish pavilion, b about The largest part of the budget that was spent this year on the restoration and reconstruction of the building is a hybrid of emptiness and overcrowding. Of the furnishings, there are only chairs, 52 adjectives are written on the floor: atmospheric, supplemented, cosmopolitan, critical, uncertain, unfinished, virtual, daily - and so on. Around them, on the walls to the ceiling, are grouped architectural graphics, representing dozens of projects and architectural studies, including phd, that is, doctoral dissertations selected in an open competition and corresponding to these adjectives. All this should represent a complex world of architectural ideas oriented towards the future, in contrast to the world of the past, the experience of the crisis in the construction sector, which was awarded the "Lion" in 2016.
The current pavilion is called becoming, in some interpretations - decor, which is consonant with the walls dotted with patterns.
During the opening, the effect of overflow was intensified, growing to a metaphor of information overflow of the modern world: people with white clothes and red shadows in their eyes wandered around the pavilion among the crowd of visitors, two young ladies in the same tunics were constantly, and I must say, quite joyfully, chatting in entrance, someone was shaving someone with a typewriter … a real performance. That did not dispose to reading data from the walls, however, as if no one had counted on it.
To get out into the air, it was required to go out into the backyard, which was arranged by a group of students who won the competition; the kindergarten will remain after the exhibition closes.
Germany: wall
Germany dedicated its exhibition to the Berlin Wall, calling it Non-Wall-Building (
Unbuilding Walls). It cannot be said that now the anniversary of the demolition or construction of the wall is 28 years since the unification of the country. According to the curators, they view the consequences of the division of Germany and, then, the process of its healing, as a "dynamic spatial phenomenon": they consider the rare museumified remains of a wall, a checkpoint, Soviet buildings, or the village of Modlaret, which after the war was divided like Berlin, into Soviet and the western part; the wall was not there, and in the western part the village turned into a tourist attraction, and the inhabitants of the eastern part were forbidden to receive guests, even relatives, closer than a few kilometers from the protected area. And so on - many stories on the back of black stripes growing out of the floor, similar to strips of paper crawling out of a shredder - curators in this way restore history, piece by piece the remnants of the trauma, trying to comprehend and get rid of it. This is not to say what turned out aesthetically pleasing, but ethical and rich in information - yes.
To broaden the topic, a group of journalists collected video interviews with people living in the “shadow of the walls”: in Cyprus, between North and South Korea, Israel and Palestine, the United States and Mexico, and at the Ceut Wall on the Moroccan border. The talking figures multiply in the mirrors according to the baroque principle, showing how many there are. For some reason, the speakers are divided by gender.
USA: leftism
In connection with the walls, one recalls the American pavilion, politicized and the left, not for nothing, the dome of the neoampiric building acquired a dashing acid color. Various things are mentioned here: Trump's tweets, the inequality of African American women and minorities, two monuments to the landing of the Confederates, which were demolished in Memphis on the Mississippi, so that only a cobblestone embankment remained from the memory - what civil monuments should be built today? And then the problems of migration, condemnation of the exploitation of resources, before looking from the earth at Space - there is also inequality, you see, it shines unevenly. But what attracts the most attention - the most understandable - is the exposition dedicated to the Trump Wall on the border of the United States and Mexico, where it is shown in detail how the wall will upset the ecological balance and animal trails. Apparently, everything has already been said about human paths.
The spectacular part is made up of bales of tow, brushwood and Mississippi stones, as well as a metaphysical type of graphics, there are several curators. The star party is played by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, participating in the space panorama project.
Israel: the temple
In front of the Israeli pavilion at the opening ceremony, the military traditionally stood, and it is dedicated to religious territories of varying degrees of controversy; the task of the exposition is to "walk along the edge" of the smoldering conflicts using the architectural-spatial method. Many wrinkled their noses: “politicized”, “this is such a difficult topic,” and it seems they soon left; but in vain, the pavilion of Israel is distinguished by meticulous analysis of topics.
The model of the Church of the Resurrection and the Holy Sepulcher was made of wood by Konrad Schick, a German watchmaker and archaeologist, Protestant, by order of the Governor of Jerusalem, Sureya Pasha, in 1862. It became a three-dimensional visual display of the Ottoman edict Status Quo, which recorded the division of the territories of the Temple of the Resurrection between Christian denominations that existed by 1853; all this was important after the Crimean War of 1853-1856, which began over the rights of Christian minorities in the Holy Places, the explication says. It is clear that the model was needed in order to visually fix the boundaries in space, and now it is broken in places, broken, chipped off - a kind of shabby artistic expression also reflects the tension between the owners - here on the wall it is written: it is made of separate painted elements, which can be removed and put in place, and for some reason this quality is interpreted not only as an instrument of clarity, but also as a reflection of the possibility of "reformulating" the Starus Quo system.
For example, it can be clearly seen that the dome of the Resurrection rotunda over the Holy Sepulcher is half common on the outside, half belongs to the Greek Church, and inside a significant part of it is attributed to the Armenian Church, and so on; the possessions of the Latin and Greek churches in the part of the Temple are also intertwined. A significant part of the building to the northeast of the Temple proper belongs to the Coptic Church.
Several stories are told on the second floor:
Mughrabi trail / bridge to the temple mount, to the only gate open to non-Muslims. It has always been an earthen ramp, the height difference is 6 m; but in 2004, the embankment was destroyed, first by an earthquake, and then washed away after a snowfall, and a temporary wooden bridge was built in its place. So, since the authorities of Israel, Palestine and the WACF cannot agree, they cannot build a permanent bridge. Or here is the tomb of the Old Testament Rachel to the north of Bethlehem - it used to be accessible to everyone, but at the beginning of the 21st century it was surrounded by a concrete fence with wire on top, it seems, under tension, and now only Jews are allowed there - all known stories, the exhibition is rather working on attracting attention to them. Finally, ten mock-ups on the second floor represent urban projects to reimagine the square in front of the Wailing Wall: shortly after the six-day war, the Israelis destroyed the village of Mughrabi, expanding the space in front of the Wall, it used to be about 4 meters wide. The village was about 800 years old. It turned out to be a large area, this year - this topic is the most lively one - architects began to suggest ways of its spatial comprehension.
France: glimpses of hope
Curators
pavilion of France - a group whose name translates as "Still Happy", the theme - "Endless Spaces: Build Buildings or Places?", the main plot - examples of repeated "social" development of abandoned places, economical, cultural, associated with cheap housing and art - clusters, although still not squatting - not a word about it, it seems, everything is legal. There is also a play on words, in fact, it is not about endless, but about unfinished spaces, about the prospects for their endless development.
The exposition is also left-politicized, it is not for nothing that the columns are wrapped in almost the same acid color as in the American pavilion, but the French know how to do everything elegantly and easily: “confronting the gigantic challenges of our time, where environmental problems painfully collide with the dominance of the market economy, selfishness and authoritarianism, we must not lose hope,”the curators say.
The central part contains 10 projects-examples of such confrontations to the problems of the time, "not exactly samples, but glimpses of hope" - among them a non-profit camp of mobile homes, the history of the development of an abandoned metallurgical plant in Normandy, a cultural cluster at a former tobacco factory in Marseille, where life gradually expands and self-regulates, or the buildings of the Hotel Pasteur in Rennes, built in 1888 for the Faculty of Natural Sciences, which in 1967 moved and turned into a hotel by forces - who do you think? - the curators of the exhibition, the Encore heureux group, who thus share their experiences.
In this case, architecture exists on the borderline between the historical reality of the properties of a place and the natural process of their re-development, guided only by the needs of people who have settled there, - the curators comment. Everything is shown beautifully, on the walls of history, in a separate hall "endless places", a kind of furry overgrown with their infinite potential, 10 projects are shown by wonderful models of laser cutting on good plywood, vanity, meaning people - citizens, living participants in the process of redevelopment of places, is represented by the installation like a Kabakov communal apartment of shovels, wheelbarrows and rubber boots, but it is raised above the head and does not interfere.
In general, the same thing as in the American pavilion - citizens, opposition to the consumer society, but there the left eye looks into space, and here it is getting closer to man and more lyrical, it concerns both freedom and space.
Denmark
Obviously, from the declared topic, they chose who is free, who is space, to varying degrees. Here is the Danish pavilion, facing the future no less than the Spanish one, showing Possible Spaces - four ways of new "sustainable" development and four strengths of Danish architecture, according to the country's Minister of Culture.
The most talked about
BLOX - Danish Architecture Center, built by OMA in Copenhagen Harbor.
And visitors are most attracted by the displayed filling.
hyperloop, similar to a fragment of a spaceship, rude and pragmatic, never futuristic in appearance, but truthful. Nearby they show schematically how it will flash outside the window for a person sitting in a high-speed transport capsule in an airless pipe and with reduced friction. Installation by Bjarke Ingels (BIG) and Virgin Hyperloop One.
But other innovations also got their share of attention: the entire entrance, like a hornet's nest, was overgrown with a wing-like structure made of architectural fabric, and not just any, but environmentally friendly.
A completely different version of the innovation is the story of the renovation of the Alberslund Sid social housing complex, built in 1963-1968. The delicacy of renovation is emphasized here, attention to the fact that people have lived here for decades within the same walls and these walls may be dear to them. Plants and traditional coatings: metal, tiles, turn into a self-valuable exhibition of textures, as has happened at the Biennale.
Luxembourg: the legs of architecture
The exposition of the small principality in the new building of the Arsenal begins with the fact that only 8% of its territory is public property, the remaining 92% is private land. Therefore, 8% of the pavilion space is devoted to a narrow entrance corridor, allowing the visitor to understand how small it is.
Further, the curators recall the legs of Le Corbusier's houses and other ways in which modernist architects freed space - the very freespace - for the people, and put together an exhibition of large generalized models of the classics' buildings. Everyone got it, both metabolists and El Lissitzky; but it looks, in general, like a textbook, especially on the wall next to it there is a tape of chronology of modernist architecture; but the tutorial is nice and smells like plywood layouts.
Argentina: climatic
The pavilion cannot be called empty - the Argentines show many buildings with drawings on the wall: buildings built after 1983, "Argentina's return to democracy", have been selected. Sketch graphics are designed to help show the main thing in projects - almost like Zumthor's, and a complete catalog of selected buildings has been published and distributed to everyone.
In the center of the dark room, however, it is “horizontal dizziness” - this is the name of the project: a long aquarium with a climatic installation over bunches of large grass, with a change of day and night, thunderstorms and sun, birds singing. You can look inside from different sides. Natural installations and sketches of buildings should build a connection between nature and the man-made landscape. Everything is provided with QR codes.
Poland: freedom of coolness
The Polish National Pavilion is located on the "island" behind the bridge, when people get there, most of all, they want to fall from fatigue and heat. This idea was caught by the curators of the Polish pavilion, launched its air conditioner at full power and arranged a swimming pool with floating models. All those who got there were incredibly grateful to them for their laconicism and philanthropy.
Meanwhile, the project is called "Expanding Nature" and explores no less than the global universe of Anthropocene architecture, the geological period corresponding to modernity, that is, the period when humanity significantly affects the earth's ecology. The global message is set off by a study of Soviet buildings from 1954-1976 by the Warsaw Academy of Arts: they studied light and the circulation of water - these buildings were created with an understanding of how the Earth works. We also designed a couple of hypothetical buildings, thinking about rain and changing times of day. Slanting rain is depicted with many copper wires.
Of course, this is not all: as always, the pavilion of Italy is large-scale, the pavilion of China is filled with real projects, the pavilion of Latvia, dedicated to various aspects of multi-apartment housing, is interesting. It’s impossible to cover everything at once.
