Architect 2014-07.pdf

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massive hunk from Chile to Italy. “We got a very
nice grant from a marine transport company,”
he said.
Only slightly less daunting maritime
logistics faced attendees leaving the Biennale
on Sunday, as a boat race shut down the
Grand Canal. The night before, as word of the
impending closure started making the rounds
of a launch party for design journal Clog (their
new issue devoted, naturally, to Koolhaas),
attendees discussed possible alternative routes
to the airport. “We could always swim across
the lagoon,” said one wag. “Yeah,” said another,
“but if we were Rem, we could just walk on it.”
Sarcasm aside, this Biennale did seem
to confirm one of the peculiar aspects of the
Koolhaas Effect in architecture today: The Dutch
dynamo was less important for what he built
himself than for how his ideas forced every other
designer in attendance to react. When this
Biennale is viewed in years to come, however,
its signal lesson may be just this: Do as Koolhaas
says, designers, but perhaps not as he does.
The Silver Lion for National
Participation went to
Chile for “Monolith
Controversies,” which
includes a concrete panel
from one of the first
prefabricated housing
units donated by the Soviet
Union to Salvador Allende’s
government, in 1972.
Such units became central
in the political upheaval
that ensued in the South
American nation.
SERGIO PIRRONE