The national participations: US, Poland; Serbia, Bahrain. And then Olafur Eliasson with Little Sun

Yes, of course: there were various attempts (above all from the past right wing government) to make a new Biennial of Design in Venice. It still has to happen but for sure at 13^th Architecture Biennale signed by David Chipperfield there is a lot of indoor and outdoor design either in the National Pavilions and, indeed one exceptional example, at the main section – maybe this phenomena has been originated by the theme, common ground, or by the crisis in building industry. Unintentional or a strong complement to develop the idea of a pavilion, anyway it is, the design is very present, its weight is extraordinary and in some of the cases we will note above all how it is useful to the communities, the widest possible. So, we compiled a short guide to catch it, even at the end of Biennial by contacting directly the authors or by checking the shops that already are selling it.

In my opinion, given the theme, the Golden Lion for National participations would be better to have been assigned to three pavilions ex-aequo – USA, Poland, Bahrain – indeed the first and the second received a special mention and, blessed, have been sub-awarded by the Jury.

Even starting from the pavilion formation, USA gave us a lecture and a good practice of design, beside to embody a perfect best practice in exhibits. Managed by the Institute for Urban Design (that is not a school but a membership association for architects: it has only two employers and a budget of above 200.000 euro per year), it has been appointed to the curatorship via an award by the State Department, assigned with the National Endowment for the Arts advisory committee! Do they had the budget to afford it? No, they’ve fundraised such an innovative proposal as Spontaneous Interventions is, by aggregating interest and issuing a call to vote emerging and un-commissioned projects that have been shortlisted by the audience votes!

Cathy Lang Ho, the Institute board member (the executive director is Anne Guiney), asked her former colleagues of magazine Architect to help her together with other appointed curators, as the Guggenheim Architecture and Urban Design Studies curator, David Van der Leer. The result is the best and more useful pavilion the USA ever had at this kind of biennials and also one of the most interesting of the Biennials: in my opinion it is second only to Metavilla (a French prior-Sarkozy one). Composed by two layouts that are very effective to enhance the core business of the show, the pavilion allows audience to select the vision of all the projects on show (124, a partition of the most voted from the public after a competition, accessible via key-words). The horizontal layout (by M-A-D) is a floor printed on GFloor, an innovative polyvinyl by Better Life Technology (Kansas City) showing the history of design in US. The vertical layout (by Freecell) is on the walls and has been made of weights labelled with the keywords – as green, sustainability, etc – that can me moved: by doing so, a banner related to that theme comes down to be read and contains the project(s) working on that area of communal goods and interests. Each design project is self-commissioned or eventually demanded by sui generis clients as schools, districts, communities, spontaneous gathering, even temporary of people.

In a word, the design on show in this pavilion is more on the edges of the big architecture deals and in a certain way is counteracting a selfish and self-referring design industry too: it is a design that is speaking on behalf, is direct agent of social changes, sometime localized but still able to speak of the urgency of an entire planet.
Almost no-one of the projects on show has been originated by aesthetical or functional needs, all together seem to answer to precise acts of not obedience in unequal societies, in order to fulfil a mission that is able to satisfy the widest audience possible in urban, sometime derelict spaces.
Participatory, inclusive, horizontal but not for these reasons less tactical, mainly dedicated to urban spaces or shared ones: this is the design the pavilion hosts. Some examples? Vending machines for seeds bombs, cycling lanes, tarmac lots transformed into small park-lots; portable playgrounds for children when parks are not abundant and are to be invented; then, so, micro-parks to be enabled in empty parkings or among cars; moving cars to sell vegetables and….beauty contests for neighbours, in order to increase their amenity (better blocks). Also sitting spaces and amenities that have been obtained by discarded fences mounted all at 90°…The list is quite long but the sum of the potentialities expressed by the projects inside is quite good summarized by the one outside the pavilion: Commonplace: a special arena made of many red-orange cubes, signed by Interboro (design, architecture and urban planning practice based in New York whose partners are Daniel D’Oca, Georgeen Theodore, Tobia Armborst).
According to the authors, it is like a living room for exteriors that makes of towns or places where it is settled, a more inclusive landmark. Used for the workshops and the many conferences the pavilion is hosting for all the duration of the Biennial (the next is from 6 to 12 October, Can Activism Protect Architecture? by Columbia University), Commonplace can be easily dismantled but will not return in US at the end of the Biennial or in the offices of Interboro. It will be donated to a Venetian school. The August issue of Architect is dedicated to the pavilion and publishes useful features of each of the projects on show, also containing the labour forces and the days useful to build any of them.

Bahrain, already Golden Lion with past Biennial edition with Reclaim, is again a must for a functional and touching exhibition design and furniture. Background, this is the title of the pavilion located at Arsenale, is like a place not crowded by mass and impulses, but only of objects and intentions or sensations, as the time passing through light modification. A curious portable stool, some African ethnic chaises longues for floor and above all some kinds of bench with the same style and proportions of the stools, to act as magazine holders. It is the best well done translation of an imagery (signed by three Italians: Francesco Librizzi, Matilde Cassani, Stefano Tropea). The pavilion, curated by Noura Al Sayeh, has the ambitious mission to try to investigate the sources of Bahrain imagery (media and not), what is perceived about the islands making the Kingdom. Given that is not always possible to rule medias, the pavilion offers a section of what is the place and what the media say about it, on its culture and lifestyle. By doing this only through sensations, ways of being and small inputs all fused in an extraordinary and cohesive habitat (as it was for Reclaim).

 

Poland got a jury special mention (it has been Golden Lion at XI Architecture Biennale with Hotel Polonia) with Making The Walls Quake as if They Were Dilating With The Secret Knowledge of Great Powers, curated by Katarina Krakowiak and again organized by Zacheta National Gallery of Art (Warsaw). The show has been opened by a singing performance during the vernissage days. It is a sonic sculpture that for the very first time makes visible, and audible, through vibrations, the signs and the secret forms of built environments. The pavilion title is a quote by Charles Dickens (Dombley and Son). To make sound out of the pavilion they built fake wooden walls (and also uncovered a false ceiling), under them (and also outside the pavilion) a net of recorders and amplifiers has been designed and then hidden. The natural noises of the walls have been so real time sent to the audio speakers by being first translated in sounds – unknown and never heard before. Also Carsten Nicolai did the same in a public piazza in Naples, on 2010 with his Pioneer championing and making udible the earthquakes noises in real time.
Sound is starring quite much in architecture and art literature, especially in the work of those artists pointing the relations with space, of who tries to listen to architecture, trying to translate the forms in other languages that are able to be shared to the widest audience possible, as sound. Krakowiak was intending to make a sound sculpture because she intended the pavilion as a system to listen and a phenomena trasmitter.

Beside Poland, the Serbian Pavilion starts from a linguistic note: the word 100 and the word table are the same in their tongue. It hosts an enormous (22x5 m) white table, as white is the sole used colour, visitors have a space of 1.5 m to move around it for all the pavilion strenght. Also the Serbian table, as the Polish Pavilion, is amplified. To promote cohesion of presences around it. The table is stable even if has only 4 legs (it has been enforced by iron bars). According to the authors, there is no answer or maybe there are more than hundred ones to understand which is the use of such a big and acoustic table as the one on show.

Chile at Arsenale creates an emotional transfer by acting on the floor, that has been built of salt: Chancha: Chilean Soilscape. Salt from Tarapaca is either the base and the context to walk in and to perceive it as glue for eight architecture practices whose creations, a thin light on in the space, are together thanks to the soil, that is much more a syntax than an architectural element.

But it is again a sitting unit, in this case a bench of the Irish Pavilion that is beside the Chilean one, authors are Heneghan Peng Architects (chosen to represent the country for their International standard), to catch the visitors as object. It is a hanging bench. The authors say: “Venice is a perfect place to take measure of this element which suggests links to another site – the Nile Valley. An ancient Egyptian rod for measuring the water level of the Nile inspired the design of a responsive oscillating bench which invites visitors to balance their respective weights. The bench constitutes a shifting ground located in the unstable field of Venice. It is about measurement and calibration of the weight of the body in relation to other bodies; in relation to the site of the installation; and in relation to water. It is located in the Artiglierie section of the Arsenale. Its level is calibrated against the mark of the acqua alta in the adjacent brickwork of the building which marks a horizontal datum in a floating world.”

Mario Nanni, few steps away, has a solo show with his lighting artworks. Some, unforgottable, as the primitive and poetical dating 1999:  “La infilo, la giro. Apro, entro. La piccola leva è sempre lì. Che mi aspetta. Accendo la mia lampadina. La mia anima è in casa.”

Again is Olafur Eliasson (who incredibly did not get a prize or a nomination) to win on every level of design. We already saw him working on light in Venice (light is one of the natural elements he likes to manipulate at the best): either sampling the horizon of Venice Lagoon in an ad hoc pavilion built with David Adjaye at San Lazzaro Island during Art Biennial (2005), either invited by Nordic Pavilions on 2003 (and also the last Architecture Biennale for a low cost installation suspended among art and design, entitled Your Split Second House ).

He is starring with Little Sun, a portable and solar-chargeable led light capsuled in a plastic bright yellow sun. On sale at Biennial bookshop and on the project website (check it in the links of this feature), for each light purchased in Western countries, it will finance a light spreading where there is no electrical grid. The lamp is less than 20 euros, and at Tate London there has been the same installation of Biennale: small lights and a mini-movie festival where many famous International artists have been called by Olafur to make a movie on light.