Architect 2014-07.pdf

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ARCHITECT THE AIA MAGAZINE JULY 2014 WWW.ARCHITECTMAGAZINE.COM
The Austrian Pavilion’s
exhibition “Plenum.
Places of Power,”
conceived and designed
by Christian Kühn and
Harald Trapp, featured
200 1:500 scale models
of parliament buildings
from around the world.
the Israeli Pavilion (an offbeat examination
of the country’s urbanism using sand-sifting
digital fabricators), and the Austrian Pavilion
(wall-mounted models of the national capitol
buildings of over 200 countries). For the
first time at an Architecture Biennale, the
chief curator had tasked all of the national
pavilions with a single overarching theme:
“Absorbing Modernity: 1914–2014.” Far from
being a limiting agent, this guideline seemed
to inspire many participants to reach further
and think deeper.
It’s surprising, in fact, that the
Architecture Biennale had to wait till the
arrival of Koolhaas for someone to impose
some sense of conceptual order on the unruly
Giardini. As an exhibition environment,
the rambling walkways and waterways
at Venice’s eastern end remain a curious
place—one part public space, one part artsy
theme park—with the feeling that sometimes
it is a necropolis populated by unusually
extravagant tombs. “I like some of the older
pavilion buildings, just for what they are,”
says architect John Denton of Denton Corker
Marshall, an Australian firm tasked with
the daunting commission of creating a new
space for their native country. When it’s
completed later this year, the new Australian
Pavilion—a simple, black granite volume
with what Denton describes as a “very
Melbourne” character—will not only be the
latest addition to the Biennale fairgrounds,
but perhaps the last: Preservationist-minded
Venetians are staunchly opposed to any
further construction, and only a bureaucratic
loophole allowed the Australians to move
forward with this project.
In the meantime, “Absorbing Modernity”
did seem to breathe some new and muchneeded
life into the faintly funereal exhibition
grounds—a sharp contrast with Koolhaas’s
own shows, in which the organizing theme
was conspicuous in its absence. The Arsenale
show was especially perplexing. In room after
room of the vast complex, Koolhaas’s assorted
collaborators investigated built culture in the
home country of the Biennale, using media as
varied as film, dance, and archival material
to uncover the assorted complexities and
contradictions of Italy today. There was much
to like in the show, not the least of which
was the documents and public programming
of Beatriz Colomina’s “Radical Pedagogies:
Action-Reaction-Interaction” installation,
as well as the 82 movie clips on display
throughout the space showing how Hollywood
has taken on the Italian landscape. But if
there was a thesis at work, it was difficult to
make out, and the Italian Pavilion just around
the corner covered much the same material
with greater concision and curatorial flare,
especially with its full-scale model of Milan
complete with digital projections showing
urban networks and planning proposals
over the centuries.
Koolhaas’s “Elements” only threw the
thematic center of gravity even further
off-kilter, with the Central Pavilion given
RUY TEIXEIRA