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.