Fondazione Querini Stampalia by Carlo Scarpa

While on my trip to Venice for the Architecture Biennale, I also paid a trip to the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, which includes a bookshop carved out by architect Mario Botta, and a renovated ground floor by Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa. The former Palazzo, previously rendered unusable by the frequent invasion of sea water, was given a new lease of life by Scarpa, with the use of gutters and stone steps, which allow the water to come in by just the right amount. The attention to detail continues into the garden, with intricate water features and bands of golden mosaic tiles.

 All images my own

13th Venice Architecture Biennale 2012- Aldo Rossi Exhibition

For the past week I have been in Venice for the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale, working for the British Council on the British Pavilion, Venice Takeaway, and doing a few posts for Building Design. Hence the lack of attention to this blog, but I do have plenty of blog posts to be catching up with, sharing with you my favourite bits from the Arsenale and Giardini over the next few days.

Below is a blog post I did for BD on an Aldo Rossi exhibition. You can see the post here on the Venice Blog on bdonline, or if you are a subscriber you can look at this week's Digital Edition of the magazine here.

Aldo Rossi, Image: Anni Settanta

In an exhibition space designed and installed by Renzo Piano, on the southern most tip of the Dorsoduro, and adjacent to former boating warehouses, is a small but perfectly formed exhibition on Milanese architect Aldo Rossi. For the duration of the Biennale, the Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova is showcasing sixteen theatre projects by the architect, from the early seventies to the late nineties. Enter a grey wooden door, and you are enveloped by a similarly grey wooden landscape, associated with the maritime constructions of its neighbours, and neatly sloping up to the back of the hulled out warehouse.

Intersected by giant 1:5 Rossi models, the exhibition space is a theatrical stage set in itself. Among the highlights is the Teatro de Mondo from 1979, complete with an almost life-size blue and yellow construction of the theatre. Rossi said of the lighthouse-like form, inspired by the architecture of Venice and the black wood of the gondolas, ‘Its structure could only be wood…it is the house of light for those observing and being observed’. It is just a shame that the visitor to the exhibition could not step into the model themselves, to peer in and out of the Wendy house styled windows.  

Perhaps most illuminating about Aldo Rossi’s fantastic vision for theatres is the competition project for the Teatro Paganini in Parma from 1964. Rossi describes the problem of conceiving a monument, ‘I have always thought of architecture as a monument, of its indifference to secondary functions. In the great eras of theatre…the theatre was there forever as a monument. Greek theatre was part of the urban fabric, it contained the city. I have designed cylinders and columns, lines and angles, and have raised a triangular conduit above the city and various porticos. In this way, I have sought to create an urban architecture, to give a public character to the theatre’.

The Teatro Domestico, built for the ‘Domestic project’ exhibition, at the Triennale de Milano of 1986 is accompanied by tea and coffee pots produced on a giant scale as stage props by Alessi. These were designed for the wooden structure of a home, a stage set cut into a sectional model to show the domestic ornaments ridiculously out of proportion to their surroundings. A turquoise horse stands proudly on a podium next to the Alessi coffee pots, taken from Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, which inaugurated the summer season of 1986 at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna. The last theatre project comes from the competition entry of 1997 for the Gran Teatro la Fenice in Venice, which Rossi did not live to see finished.  

Alongside these objects are over 120 drawings and sketches, from carefully laid-out blueprints, to rough sketches, and perhaps best of all, fantastical and atmospheric watercolours. In this way the visitor experiences the typical way Rossi worked, from a narrative to a built object. If you have time to venture out of the hub of the Giardini and Arsenale, this exhibition should be the first thing on your list. The setting is ideal, set along a waters edge that is as dramatic and colourful as Rossi’s expressive visions. Outside the gallery there was even a golden crane used for lifting boats into the water, decorated with carnival patterns and traditional Venetian red stripes, a sleepy Venetian sailor taking a siesta underneath it. Now that couldn’t really happen anywhere else.

All images my own except otherwise specified.

Beautiful ode to Brooklyn by Woodkid

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

I have recently just finished reading 'The Glass Room' by Simon Mawer, a novel loosely based on Mies van der Rohe's Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czech Republic. The book follows the fictional family of the Laudauers, a successful Jewish car manufacturer and his Aryan wife Liesel, from their honeymoon in Venice in 1929 to the early 1990s. They commission architect Rainer von Abt to design the modernist Laudauer House, on a hillside near a provincial Czech town. Referencing Adolf Loos's famous dicta that 'ornament is crime', the building embraces modern living with the 'Glass Room', 'der Glasraum', alongside rich onyx walls and bespoke furniture. But the family are soon ousted from their masterpiece by Nazi troops, the building slipping from hand to hand, from Czech to Nazi to Soviet, but always having a gravitational pull to its owners. 

The real building, Villa Tugendhat was commissioned by Fritz Tugendhat (1895-1958) and his wife Grete (1903-1970), who both came from Jewish German families of industrialists and traders who had lived in Brno for several generations. Grete was the one primarily interested in living in a modernist home, saying, “I truly longed for a modern spacious house with clear and simple shapes. My husband was horrified by the idea of having rooms full of objects and cloths as he had known from childhood.” Mies van der Rohe was employed in 1929, designing a free standing three-storey Villa, with an open interior, harmonised by a rich palette of materials. The Tugendhats said at the time, “He consequently explained the importance of utilising noble materials in Modernist structures, in particular, which do not contain decorations or ornamentation, this having been a neglected idea up until then by even, for example, Le Corbusier.” The centre piece, the Onyx wall, honey-coloured and marbled yellow, was mined from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco in North Africa. 

I have never actually been to Villa Tugendhat, but it is definitely on my list next. I certainly enjoyed the book- the description of the interior spaces and how they effected each of the characters- even Liesel when she is old and blind can recognise the Glass Room, the Glass Volume or der Glasraum. 

Grete Tugendhat                                                   Fritz Tugendhat

 Images

Also don't miss a small exhibition on Villa Tugendhat at the RIBA, 66 Portland Place. Don't expect much from the exhibition, but it is interesting nevertheless to see the black and white photographs of the Villa. Find details here.

Round up of the student shows on Blueprint Magazine

This year the Blueprint team and a panel of 14 critics (one of them me) traveled to student degree shows around the country. After viewing hundreds of presentations from a diverse range of disciplines, we have compiled our findings, bringing you some of this year’s best work from the designers and architects of the future. Be sure to check it out here.

Dessislava Lyutakova, Dip Arch, Architectural Association

Amy Hiley, The Green Living City Wall, Bartlett School of Architecture

Janinder Bhatti, Dip Arch, Bartlett School of Architecture 

Ned Scott, The War Rooms, St. James’s Park, Bartlett School of Architecture

Erika Renedo Illarregi, Empathology, MA Industrial Design, Central Saint Martins

Clarissa Wenborn, The Urban Weave, University of Nottingham

Joseph Popper, MA Design Interactions, Royal College of Art

Sanna Rautio, The New Elizabethans, Westminster University

A hot-blooded tribute to New Orleans by Nightjar

One of my favourite bars, Nightjar (entered through a nondescript door just off Old Street roundabout down to a candlelit bar that takes you back to the 1920s) are hosting a hot-blooded tribute to New Orleans on Saturday 11 August with live music, performance, food and drink from the Big Easy.

Here's what they say:
The city of ‘blood, lust and magic’ is also thought to be the home of jazz – where Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong both refined their musical trade in the district of licensed pleasure houses of the Fin de siècle French Quarter, on the corner of Basin Street, otherwise known as Storyville.

Storyville recreates the precocious and hot-blooded culture borne out of those bordellos in our very own East London by transforming Shoreditch event space Factory 7 into a Belle Epoque vision of the past. Featuring Nightjar’s regular musicians Hugo Simmonds, The Basin Street Brawlers, Brass Volcanoes and Dom and the Ikos, with support from Monkey Stomp Blues, guests will be led on a musical journey from early Ragtime numbers and brass band parades to the stomping sounds of Professor Longhair and Fats Waller. This musical feast will be complemented by fast-stepping dancers of Swing Patrol and a series of performing and interactive artists from Les Enfants Terribles dedicated to bringing the enduring spirit of New Orleans alive.

In order to enliven our audience’s spirit, we have gone straight to the heart of the Big Easy, using Southern Comfort, Gentleman Jack & Woodford Reserve Bourbon to create a range of classic New Orleans cocktails on the menu, overseen by the Nightjar. It wouldn’t be a New Orleans without a Sazerac (Woodford Reserve Bourbon, Enigma Blanche Absinthe, sugar, Peychaud’s bitters), the Bayou Barbeque (Smoked Gentleman Jack, maple syrup, chocolate bitters, BBQ rim) or New Orleans Julep (Southern comfort, rose-water , almond syrup, fresh lime juice, mint). Guests will also be able to sample a range of traditional serves from the dedicated Enigma Absinthe bar. Be sure to bring an appetite as we will likewise be serving New Orleans gastronomic delicacies Gumbo and Jambalaya.

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Borrow Build Abandon by Jamie McGregor Smith

This documentary series by Somerset born photographer Jamie McGregor Smith explores the legacy of the 2004 Athens Olympics. They seem to suggest a modern ruin, similar to the Ancient Greek ruins of the Acropolis and Delphi, that has come about from the the country's current economic downturn. Only three of the twenty-four stadiums, built at a cost of $15 Billion, are currently in public use, the remaining requiring an annual $100 million in upkeep costs. McGregor Smith says, "Olympic construction highlights the continued trend of public borrowing for structures that have limited shelf life. They come at a huge cost of limited natural resources, requiring energy consumption and carbon emission that far defies the intelligence and understanding we've been fortunate to develop.. We need to consider the possibility that all human construction in future could have the technology of functional adaptation". Watch this space London. 

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