plenty of money and full colour brochures…

i think this will be my last post from this 2010 Biennale of Architecture…and i have barely skimmed the surface…but i think for now…enough…!

A room jam-packed with talking heads, examples of the 2,000 hours of interviews made by the art curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist, including all the participants in this current Biennale.

The Japanese woman you can see is architect Kazuyo Sejima, one half of the Tokyo-based practice Sanaa and also the first female director of this event…not so surprising is that, as ever in these things, among participants, interviews, the female presence is in the minority…

Provisional Space by Wang Wei

 

“RECLAIM” an installation representing the Kingdom of Bahrain who were  awarded the golden lion for the best national participation, is an investigation into the decline of sea culture in the island. Three fishermen’s huts were transported from their original sites in Bahrain to form the focal point of the installation. (…the Kingdom of Bahrain are not short of a bob or two they had stacks and STACKS of thick full colour brochures to give away…)

…and this most definitely concludes my posts from Venice for now…back to real life for a wee bit…but not before one last gratuitous day and night shot of this beautiful, beautiful city…

more architecture biennale 2010 on this blog:

society of the spectacle

arsenale

other pavilions

rural urbanism and rethinking happiness

more giardini

venice biennale of architecture

society of the spectacle…

Transsolar + Tetsuo Kondo architects: Cloudscapes

below the clouds…

above the clouds…

“The ability to touch, feel and walk through the clouds is a notion drawn from many of our fantasies. Gazing out of aeroplane windows, we often daydream of what it might be like to live in this ethereal world of fluffy vapour“

walking under, above and inside the clouds…

…and speaking of pure spectacle Olafur Eliasson was also here with a work called Your Split Second House:

bloody difficult to photograph…3 ropes whirl round and round. Water runs down them and creates a rhythmic thrashing sound as it hits the ground. All this happens in the pitch dark and is illuminated only by sporadic strobe lighting…It was fun, nothing more nothing less but not on a par with some of his more epic works.

“A split second is the space between 2 seconds. The gap between past and future; not just the part of now that is a void, seemingly frozen in time. In it nothing changes. What might change is the way we relate to it. Habitual coordinates such as subject and object, gravity and anti-gravity are freed up. This feeling of reconstituting our way of experiencing the world can happen suddenly, in a jolt. We do not feel the split second, but only realize afterwards that we have lived through one.” Olafur Eliasson

…another appearance from the art peeping tom…my companion mutters that this is like a Pistoletto mirror, putting the audience into the picture…

outside…

more architecture biennale 2010 on this blog:

plenty of money and full colour brochures

arsenale

other pavilions

rural urbanism and rethinking happiness

more giardini

venice biennale of architecture

arsenale…

Another surprise…’cos normally with the Art Biennale i don’t like the Arsenale as a venue, it’s so huge and cavernous (beautiful in its own right of course), filled with a great vomit of art…video and sound are all thrown in together to the total detriment of all concerned…in the end you feel assaulted by the art while struggling to remember any one piece…

“If Buildings could Talk” – People watching a 3D film installation by Wim Wenders (not so great – using some of the ideas from Wings of Desire but none of the poetry!)

…so imagine my surprise as i find myself enjoying the Arsenale experience. There seem to be fewer pieces for a start and they are more considered, some are site specific, undaunted by the scale of their environment and there is much less video which (in this venue’s case) is a good thing  and the video that is installed is decently isolated so it does not invade its neighbouring environments…

“Balancing Act” by Ensamble studio

“we have understood the whole arsenale as a theme of multiple counterpoint, where after the appearance of the original space, different voices occur around that theme, developed and carried in intervals, creating a complex compositional sequence, an architectural ”fugue”, in which different spaces follow one another, and in which the dissonant balance of the ‘balancing act’ is just one chord.“  Ensamble Studio

Meanwhile in Croatia…

Croatia’s floating pavilion

Croatia had this great idea of building a pavilion on a barge and floating it to Venice. They built the pavilion…they even floated it…But it never made it to Venice as they experienced extreme construction problems…the thing collapsed, see here for some rather marvellous photos…

…a quiet but heartfelt cheer for the architect who still bothers, or indeed is capable to put pen to paper and eschew, at least for a little the PC…

Gratuitous shot of Venice…

Indigenous Venetian architecture – this is a Squero – unusual in a city built from stone – the traditional wooden structure where gondolas are built…

other architecture biennale 2010 posts on this blog:

plenty of money and full colour brochures

society of the spectacle

other pavilions

rural urbanism and rethinking happiness

more giardini

venice biennale of architecture

other pavilions…

Other pavilions in the Giardini venue…The Australian pavilion was a bit like an 80′s disco, all black and dayglo…

punters walking down the stairs to: “now and when: Australian urbanism”

‘Now’ focuses on prototypical urban narratives that apply to Australian urbanism as a whole; ‘When’ utilizes 3D stereoscopic imaging to illustrate urban futures for the continent…

My friend is beginning to get annoyed as he sees very little out of one eye and all these 3D installations (there are a lot this year) are starting to make him feel a little left out!

The Serbian pavilion is equally strange…

…here they encourage us to take plants for a walk on little mad max style wheeled contraptions…hmm, not sure about the blurb above, in the end it does not really mean anything, although i did enjoy the botanic-mechanic creations below as objects…lovely cooking pots, saw similar ones when i spent some time in Zagreb, Croatia a few years back…

…what do you imagine they were thinking about when they designed this????

“Detached” – Installation from Chile by Pezo Von Ellrichschausen Architects

more architecture biennale 2010 on this blog:

plenty of money and full colour brochures

society of the spectacle

arsenale

rural urbanism and rethinking happiness

more giardini

venice biennale of architecture

rural urbanism and rethinking happiness…

…still in the Architecture Biennale of 2010…rural urbanism – the city enters the countryside, the country enters the city

Please bear in mind that i have just spent a rather intensive über arty and not always easy 4 months working with 14 other artists. So maybe it’s just that i am rather easily pleased at the moment…but i really enjoyed this installation…am speaking pure fun and aesthetic pleasure here as i have not had time to read all the text (yet) and to understand if this is some kind of proposal for a realistic “utopia” or another kind of dogmatic enforcement of urban planning or impossible political correctness… So instead and for the moment i just want to revel in the pleasure of the installation itself…hours of fun…and pick out some of the crazy details…

“rethinking happiness” is a research project showing 4 different new possible communities on a total surface of 40mq, curated by italian architect and designer Aldo Cibic, Rural Urbanism is one of the 4 aforementioned projects:

New Communities, New Polarities – how a small centre becomes a large centre

One hour from Shanghai, a large rural territory with an ancient agricultural tradition is crushed between a growing industrial zone and a new city.

The idea is to create an agricultural park of 4 sq km inhabited by 8000 persons with low-density residential structures, preserving the agriculture and offering green spaces for the inhabitants. the project calls for a group of elevated buildings on the streets, to create a perpendicular grid that floats over the countryside.

The more time i spent looking, the more “unusual” things i found, for example a crime scene here, can you see the body outline on the ground?:

or this…architecture style of Benny Hill???…Only in Italy surely…rural urbanism…in a bikini anyone??

Studio Andrea Branzi – Per una Nuova Carta de Atene (plus art peeping tom…)

more architecture biennale 2010 on this blog:

plenty of money and full colour brochures

society of the spectacle

arsenale

other pavilions

more giardini

venice biennale of architecture