Rem Koolhaas confirmed as 2014 Venice Biennale curator

Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has been officially confirmed as director of the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. The board of the Venice Biennale, chaired by Paolo Baratta, met today in Venice to thank David Chipperfield for his achievements at the 2012 Architecture Biennale, and to congratulate Koolhaas on the appointment. Koolhaas said: “We want to give a new look to the basic elements of architecture - used by any architect, anywhere and at any time - to see if we can discover something new about architecture”. The board of the Venice Biennale described Koolhaas as “one of the greatest personalities of the architects of our time “.

Via bdonline

The Olivetti showroom in St Mark's Square, Venice by Carlo Scarpa

Olivetti was established as an office equipment company in the 1930s by Adriano Olivetti. Olivetti enriched his technical design teams with graphic designers, architects, writers, artists and advertisers, and commissioned many well known architects of the time to design offices, factories and showrooms, the most beautiful being Carlo Scarpa’s showroom in Venice’s St Mark’s Square, which has recently been restored by Italy’s National Trust, FAI. While recently in Venice I went to have a look..

Images my own

The Castelvecchio, Verona by Carlo Scarpa

Having seen a wealth of Carlo Scarpa buildings and sculptures in Venice, I was starting to get a bit bored of the same details and the same steps and stairs, which although undoubtedly are very beautiful, they border on repetitive after the fifth or sixth time. The Castelvecchio, however, a museum located within the complex of a solid red brick fortress on the banks of Verona’s river Adige, only secured by love for all things Scarpa. Restored by Carlo Scarpa from 1957 to 1975, the museum has all the hallmarks of a classic Scarpa building, with carefully considered details ranging from the stands and fixtures holding up the Byzantine art, to the apertures and openings that mark the meetings of different materials.

The main wow-factor for me appeared after the initial series of gallery rooms, where a balancing act of ramps and staircases attach the gallery to the fortress wall and bridge across the river. Here a statue of a Lord on a horse, Cangrande- the greatest of the della Scala family, the Lords of Verona in the fourteenth century- stands precariously on a landing strip looking over the Giardini below. Here, also, Scarpa demolished part of a barracks added by the occupying French during the nineteenth century. Thus, Scarpa renovated the Castelvecchio originally built in 1354, patching up the ancient and old with the modern, not only turning the museum into a classic masterpiece mimicking the textures and forms of the Byzantine and Renaissance, but also subtly pointing the visitor to its illustrious past.

There was even a little dog who enjoyed the gardens at the Castelvecchio!

In Praise of Doubt at Punta Della Dogana gallery renovated by Tadao Ando

Tadao Ando first met art collector Francois Pinault- France's own Charles Saatchi- in 2001 when he was selected in an international competition to design the Foundation Francois Pinault pour l'art contemporain, on the bank of the River Seine in Paris. When the project fell through, Pinault again approached Ando to renovate the 18th century Palazzo Grassi on the Grand Canal of Venice. Though the Palazzo Grassi is beautiful, there were severe preservation guidelines that prevented Pinault creating the contemporary art gallery he so wanted. Beating a proposal to expand their own collection by the Guggenheim Foundation, Pinault and Ando won the proposal to renovate the Punta Della Dogana, further down the canal near Accademia. Ando said of the building, which was completed in 2009: "We were again faced with the theme of how to produce a modern space while drawing out the latent power of the original building. By exposing the bricks of hidden walls and the wooden roof trusses that had been concealed during the frequent renovations, I wanted to further emphasise the charm of the spaces by adding just a few new architectural elements, while highlighting the individuality of the building."

Sited on the furthest tip of the Dorsoduro, the original building takes on the shape of the triangular volume of the land. The old building of the Punta Della Dogana is brought into the present by a concrete cube inserted into the full height of the museum from which all routes are brought together. Ando's renovation strips back the building to its original form, showing off its classic Venetian traits, while at the same time juxtaposing them with monolithic, smooth, grey concrete. You can also see echoes of the Italian master Carlo Scarpa, with the twenty water gates that perforate the ground floor designed by Ando. The building remains distinctly Venetian- with glimpses out to the Grand Canal through the semi-circle windows- but the success of the project has been the subtlety Ando has employed in the renovation: in other words, he has let the original building do the talking, and not his own architecture.

Caroline Bourgeois has curated an exhibition at the Punta Della Dogana titled In Praise of Doubt, that discusses our certainties about our identity, our relation with personal space and the space of Art. As Bourgeois says: "in Praise of Doubt we are referring to intimacy... The artists presented in this exhibition are interested in what is perceptible, what we can do, who we are, the clichés which we- as they- must deal with, and how in one's interior life one must wonder about and question oneself." Each room is dedicated to one artist, most of which have never been exhibited in Venice, apart from a few staple pieces, such as Cattelan's horse, which has become a virtual symbol of Punta Della Dogana. Artist Julie Mehretu was specially commissioned for Ando's central concrete cube, taking inspiration from the architecture and history of Venice, Mehretu has created two large canvases full of expressive squiggles and line drawings. One is horizontal, and one is vertical, to reference the tradition of Renaissance painting, where horizontal painting represented everyday life, and vertical painting represented religious themes. In many ways, this exhibition, along with it's sister gallery Palazzo Grassi's exhibition Voice of Images, could be seen in the same vein as Saatchi's Sensation exhibition in 1997.

Images my own