Out there: architecture beyond building.
11th international architecture exhibition, Venice
And out there, there are two worlds; one in need of a social architecture which is sensitive and contextual, and another world edging on the virtualisation of culture, to which architecture must reach in order to reinstate a new material and sensual space. Roughly speaking, the national pavilions on the 11th International Architecture Exhibition state the former, whereas Aaron Betsky’s exhibition in the Arsenale describes the latter. And, as tradition, the Biennale takes upon itself the question: what is an architecture exhibition?
A good introduction is the absorptive Hall of Fragments, by David Rockwell with Casey Jones + Reed Kroloff, who have an equally fragmented manifesto. It appears to reflect a contemporary feeling of over-identification, which creeps over architecture like a cloud; a beyond-theory, sarcastic political-correctness programmed to dissolve the architectural agenda. On the cusp of a new vision, but blind to what we will see there, each sentence of their ‘manifesto’ is presents a questioning but playful blank space carved out of its middle. A reactive zephyr of movement-sensitive cinema clips are a fitting medium for their installation, a glimpse of what lies ahead and beyond, but malleable only to the mind and body of a new technological instinct.
The medium – as questioning the role of the architect is nothing new, of course, and so the Italian Pavilion poses a choice of practices beyond theory: presenting a freshly popularised architectural activism. Exhibits include Boris Bernaskoni’s Pro-Foster dystopia, Rebar’s Park(ing) project and a punch-bag, which digitally deforms your corporate high-rise, from EXYZT. Such multi-activist groups as Rebar, who are taking part in ExperimentaDesign Amsterdam 2008 in a program called Urban Play, for instance, are the shape-shifting face of architecture, which act as an antidote to the catalogue-reliant Biennale pavilions such as Britain, Portugal or Greece. It is a shame that to express what lies ‘beyond building’ these exhibitions focus on a theoretical and historical support which far outweighs their experiential or viewing quality.
The Latvian pavilion, Dust Room by Ēriks Božis and Reinis Liepiņš, approaches the question from a very different angle. A black and tacky room extends its long tongue onto the Fondamente of the San Marco canal. Inside the freestanding envelope we are shown materialities beyond our senses. That which immediately surrounds, touches and smells, but at a microscopically enlarged scale when it becomes alien. Concrete, fabric, all that will turn to dust or architecture depending on our actions, is microscopically enlarged so that we can begin to see the materiality of cities on the same plane as the dust we breathe in in the city.
Just around the corner, the Arsenale exhibition, which traditionally forms the curatorial backbone of the Biennale, presents us with manifestos and installations of such stars as Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelb(l)au, but why is it that it resembles an elite furniture boutique? At the far side of the building lies Nigel Coates’ sensual ‘saddle club’. Surrounded by a secretive black curtain, just below the jaw line, it reveals an arrangement of leather forms to the public gaze while concealing its internal projection: a sensual dance, lit by (architectonic of course) chandelier light.
Is it a relief then to leave these fanciful flirtations behind and focus on some real issues of architectural production and procurement? The Russian pavilion, Curated by Pavel Khoroshilov and Grigory Revzin, is also not without its crossed-wires. A chess game beneath the domed ceiling is apparently taking place between representatives of foreign and Russian practices for the conquering of the architectural space of Moscow. But what do the winners strive to gain? An ideological or political victory?
Perhaps the issue most potently highlighted here is that architecture’s greatest gift and greatest victory is not political and social malleability or seductive virtuality; but permanence. Architecture is here and continues beyond, it is tangible and exists as an obviously important point of physical reference (a bit like Russia’s classicist pavilion). We cannot look out onto what is ‘out there’ if there is no here, and there can be no progress if there is not place to progress from.
The Russian pavilion, it seams, offers two variable points of progress and direction, miniaturising first one and then the other. Once by shrinking the expansive convulsions of the Moscow development market onto the scale of a room-sized chess board, and the next through representing a contrasted (but important) direction in land-architecture and the re-instatement of cultural cohesion, through Nikolai Polissky’s work, but compressing it somehow into a symbolism. One appears to move forward and the other arrests. What the Biennale does, however, is question which element performs which role; does what is beyond move us onwards or does it arrest? What is more ‘beyond’ our understanding and control – the vernacular or the commercial?
Like an empty Trojan Horse, which emerges over night from the geopolitical depths of soggy Venetian gravel, the Russian pavilion is faced with an Estonian gas pipe. It manoeuvres in the most awkward way down from the German pavilion, cuts one of the main avenues of the Giardini in two, severs visitors form their chums and legs from their heads, ending guiltily at the door of the Russian pavilion. Is this a contemporary slap in the face, dared only in the guise of an art work? Or can we discern a more complex multiplicity of meanings under its yellow skin, hiding in the impenetrable middle?
Aaron Betsky certainly seamed to think so, when he gave an impromptu supportive speech at the inauguration of the Estonian ‘pavilion’. But just as the curator, Ingrid Ruudi’s words where uttered that “architecture is not what should be exhibited at architecture exhibitions”, the heavens opened and everybody ran from the pipe to hide under the Japanese pavilion.
The Estonian curatorial (and editorial) project helps us chart a delicate development of critical practice as architecture, as well as exploring the question of exhibiting architectural infrastructure as art object, outside the context of a building or gallery space. If infrastructure can be architecture, and the other way around, then why not criticism? It may be, in fact, that architectural thinking imbedded in infrastructure becomes the most effective form of action in an increasingly dissatisfied and politically impotent profession. The Estonian pavilion speaks the same language as globally influential actions and distributions of power.
If the theme of the Biennale questions what is out there and what ‘out there’ is, then we are faced with two possible answers. That which is ‘out there’ and far away, theoretical or out of this world, the uncanny nature of which architects can tame, or ‘out there’ in the immediate sense: just outside the door and just around the corner, in politics and in culture. The exhibition attempts to form an infrastructure for these deep and unintelligible contexts, which form the foundations of any creative act, including the act of architecture beyond building.
