My Top Ten at the Venice Biennale 2012

For those yet to venture to the Venice Architecture Biennale this year, here's a list of my top ten things not to miss (in no particular order).

1. Pasticcio by Caruso St John room, Central Pavilion, Giardini

Pasticcio draws together a group of seven contemporary European architects outside of the mainstream, whose practice is unusually engaged with the language and the history of architecture, both recent and ancient. I like how the work, old and new, John Soane to Caruso St John, fit in with eachother, establishing a common ground with an architecture before modernism. 

2. Villa Rotunda Redux by FAT Architecture, Arsenale

FAT's installation, the Museum of Copying, explores the idea of the copy in architecture as an important, positive and often surreal phenomenon. The museum centres around FAT's own installation, The Villa Rotunda Redux, a 5m high re-make of Palladio's Villa Rotunda. There is also a photocopy machine so visitors can make their own Book of Copies, from a library of volumes prepared by invited architects each of whom have assembled photocopies relating to a thematic building typology. Accompanying this is Ines Weizman's 'Repeat Yourself', an interesting timeline of the legal disputes surrounding the ownership of Adolf Loos' archive and work.

3. Light Houses, Nordic Pavilion

This year, Sweden, Norway and Finland celebrated 50 years of the Sverre Fehn-designed Nordic Pavilion, which was inaugurated in 1962 with the original concept of bringing the Nordic Light to Venice. The exhibition, playing on this theme, is titled Light Houses and shows the work of thirty-two young architects born after the year of 1962­- eleven from Finland and Sweden, and ten from Norway- who have presented thirty-two small conceptual ‘houses’. Each participant’s installation responds to the spatial and atmospheric qualities of the Pavilion, while also being reflective of the architect’s own design principles. The result is simple, highly tactile and very Scandinavian.

4. Possible Greenland, Danish Pavilion

A comprehensive look at the future of Greenland, suggesting not just the problems, but some possible solutions, including a new airport designed by Bjarke Ingels. 

5. Japanese Pavilion

The Japanese Pavilion, curated by Toyo Ito, recently won the Golden Lion Award for Best Pavilion. The exhibition presents alternative housing concepts for the homes that were destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami in 2011.

Image: Dezeen

6. Inter Cities/ Intra Cities: Ghostwriting the Future

Opposite the entrance of the Arsenale, is a collateral exhibition which is just as worthy of attention. Titled Inter Cities/ Intra Cities: Ghostwriting the Future, the space shows twelve proposals, both real and speculative, for South East Kowloon in Hong Kong. Inside, a remarkable model, ‘Imaginary Kai Tak’, stands within the green scaffolding in all its Bartlett glory. It is by CAVE, a young Hong Kong-based architectural practice established in 2011 by three graduates from the Bartlett, and depicts a speculative future Kai Tak city. Here, among the glass test tubes, candy pink wind turbines and bubble-like clouds are six narratives that developed into six device systems.   

7. Gort Scott sketches, Arsenale

This was one of my favourite pieces in the Arsenale at the Venice Biennale this year. The sketches by Fiona Scott of Gort Scott are beautiful for their subtle nuances and expressive penwork, you could practically spend hours discovering the unseen world behind the front facades of London's high streets.

8. O'Donnell and Tuomey, Arsenale

Irish architects, O'Donnell and Tuomey, have created 'Vessel', a stacked timber construction which is a material response to the ubiquitous brick walls of the Arsenale. 

9. Aldo Rossi exhibition 

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. Among the highlights is the Teatro de Mondo from 1979, complete with an almost life-size blue and yellow construction of the theatre.

10. Formations, Australian Pavilion

This year's australian pavilion, titled 'Formations: New Practices in Australian Architecture' was curated by Anthony Burke, Gerard Reinmuth and TOKO Concept Design. Six young architectural practices which regularly test the accepted perspectives of the profession are showcasing what it takes to become an architect. Look out for the foosball tables. 

Images my own unless otherwise specified

Bartlett Summer Show 2012

 

The Bartlett Summer Show kicked off last Friday at the Slade School of Art in London. Featuring a cacophony of work, from first year to diploma, the week-long exhibition showcases the best of the architecture department at UCL (I may be a little biased, as I did go there myself...). Nevertheless, it is always a feast for the eyes, and in my opinion- since also going round the other London schools this week- one of the best in the country. From intricate hand-drawings and layered card models to rapidly moving zoetropes and inhuman computer renders, the Bartlett students have once again put on a fantastic show, both in the exhibition design (which they put together over an intensive week of framing, painting and welding) and the work within it.  

Unit 11: Super Urban Mega Listic

Emma Flynn, Unit 11, Trash Can Utopias

Janinder Bhatti, Unit 11, Sacrifical Flooding

Janinder Bhatti, Unit 11, Sacrifical Flooding

Martin Tang, Unit 10

Ned Scott, Unit 10

William Fisher, Unit 22

Unit 9, tutored by Max Dewdney and Chee-Kit Lai of Mobile Studio

Sarah Edwards, Unit 9

Sarah Edwards, Unit 9

Harriet Middleton-Baker, Unit 1

Unit 5 showspace

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2011

I finally got round to visiting the Summer Exhibition 2011 at the Royal Academy on Piccadilly. Unsurprisingly one of my favourite rooms was the Architecture Room, which this year was curated by Piers Gough, and Alan Stanton, who stated that the exhibition as a whole; ‘Encourages us to think about relationships between art and architecture – sculptural, conceptual and photographic.’ Piers Gough described his thoughts regarding the Architecture room itself, by explaining that architects are ‘so pleased to be in a major art show. Architecture is an art, and we owe it to the public to produce exhilarating work.’

Images: Andrew Putler

The room was circulated around four podiums featuring physical models by both students and professionals, alongside drawings, collages and photographs hanging on the duck-egg blue wall. One of my favourite pieces of work was a model titled 'Sub-Urbanism' by Archmongers, who consist of Bartlett graduates Margaret Bursa and Johan Hybschmann. The project 'Sub Urbanism' questions the ever-enduring popularity of the 20th century suburb and how it fits within the contemporary socio-ecological model of housing shortage and climate change. Another project which caught my eye was Object III - Warsaw Institute of Experimental Film: Editing Facility and Object IX - Warsaw Institute of Experimental Film: Festival Hotel by In Stasus. A previous post of mine on their project can be seen here. 

 Images: Archmongers

Images: In Stasus

The Bartlett Summer Show 2011

Last Friday was the opening night of the Bartlett School of Architecture's annual Summer Show, an event which marks triumph and fatigue in students and a look back over the work of the past year. Set in the Slade School of Art in UCL's classical quad, the exhibition showcases a wide variety of work, from new First Year's cardboard models, to Degree work and staggering drawings and films by Diploma and Phd students. I got a feeling this year that the consensus was that the Degree work is improving in leaps and bounds, perhaps due to the fact they actually design buildings! The projects seem to be seriously considered and understandable to the eye. Often it is so hard to get your head around a Diploma project within the confines of one or two A2 sheets, as the drawings or models have such a hard-to-fathom complexity. There also seems to be clear, distinctive styles between the units, from Unit 12's beautiful black and white hand drawings, to Unit 11's colourful axometrics and Unit 23's complex built models. Below are a few photos of my own from the opening night, they mainly consist of undergraduate work, partly because the show was so busy I couldn't get a look in the Diploma work!

Andro Wekua's 'Pink Wave Hunter' at Venice Biennale 2011

Zurich-based artist Andro Wekua created 15 sculptures, titled 'Pink Wave Hunter' based on memories of buildings in his destroyed home town of Sochumi, Georgia. The sculptures are mounted on a large pedestal and the theme of the installation aims to record his fleeting memories of a town that is now on the brink of architectural destruction. Wekua fled the town in the 1990's after the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict and as there is little documentation of the city in its original form, Wekua has had to rely on personal photographs and a fading memory, giving the sculptures an intriguing level of abstraction.

Images: Wallpaper