The Ministry for the Cultural Heritage and Activities, with the PaBAAC – General Direction for the landscape, fine arts, architecture and contemporary art – and the Biennale di Venezia present AILATI. Reflections from the future, an exhibition conceived by Luca Molinari for the Padiglione Italia at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition, where Studio Tamassociati will present his work in the category “Socially aware design”.

AILATI.Reflections from the future is a play on words, a reversal of the country’s name that opens up a new reading of contemporary architecture in an original and sideways glance at objects, reality and designs (in English, the title would be YLATI). The exhibition offers a bold, knowledge-led haven for reflections of the future delivered to us by reality on a daily basis; the resources upon which Italian architecture will draw to forge new forms of identity and development.

For more information on the exhibition, click here.

In 2010, Estonia is participating at the Venice Biennale of Architecture – La Biennale di Venezia, with an exposition entitled 100 HOUSES, and has thereby set a clear goal for itself – to present local architectural practices to a wider audience and introduce Estonian architectural life through the narrow sphere of private residential architecture. Kazuyo Sejima, the general curator of the exhibition, has named the 2010 exhibition “People meet in architecture”.

n order to demonstrate the historical continuity and unique position of private residential architecture in the local architectural scene, the exhibition includes private residences with special iconic meaning from the period of the first Estonian Republic and the Soviet era. However, the main emphasis is placed on the 21st century, thereby creating such a voluminous overview of the best of Estonian residential architecture for the first time.

The Exhibition is accompanied by a 250-page catalogue, with rich illustrative material and articles, to expand the topic. For more information, click here. You can see six Estonian houses after the break. read more »

© Patricia Parinejad

Photographer Patricia Parinejad shared with us this photographs of the Russian Pavilion designed by nps tchoban voss for the Venice Biennale. Check them all after the break. read more »

© Courtesy of the Authors

Based on the idea of Mirage, described at the wikipedia as a naturally occurring optical phenomenon in which light rays are bent to produce a displaced image of distant objects or the sky, the team that designed the Croatian Pavilion for the Venice Biennale decided to create a floating pavilion to present arts and architecture of Croatia at the Venice Biennale.

Following the same principles of a Fata Morgana, which is an unusual and very complex form of Mirage that can be seen in a narrow band right above the horizon, the Floating Pavilion is constructed on an existing barge with dimensions of 10m x 20m x 3m. It is designed by a group of 14 leading Croatian architects, who have made the recent Croatian architecture visible on the global scene. Instead of working in the usual formats of their practices and presenting speculative projects, they decided to work together on a single proposal and to have it constructed and towed toward its final destination in Venice right away. The pavilion structure is the barge’ cargo, welded from 30 tons of Q385 wire mesh in more than 40 layers of varying contours. The cargo presented here maps the process of intense interaction between architects working on the common project, their collaboration with the Croatian maritime industry, and the extraordinary act of architecture it produced. Please follow the pavilion’s maiden voyage across the Adriatic over here

© Courtesy of the Authors

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Parallel to the 12th Architecture Biennial in Venice, on August 27th, 2010 the Audi Urban Future Award exhibition will open at Scuola Grande della Misericordia.

Five of the architecture offices invited to participate will be presenting the results of their work to the public in an exhibition designed by Raumlaborberlin.

The offices are: Alison Brooks Architects / BIG / Cloud 9 / J. MAYER H. / standardarchitecture

The exhibition opens August 27 and will be open until September 26. For more information, click here.

Strelka

As we told you in May, OMA + AMO will collaborate with Strelka, a postgraduate school for media, architecture and design in Moscow.

Now, the presentation of this very special partnership will take place at the Architecture Biennale 2010 in Venice on August 26th between 2:30 and 3:45 pm.

More information after the break.

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You don´t need to be in Venice to witness its Architecture Biennale 2010.

By downloading Biennale App for free, you can navigate through the different events and exhibitions,  from the Vernissage to the conclusion of the Biennale.

More information after the break. read more »

In just a few short weeks, the 12th International Architecture Exhibition directed by Kazuyo Sejima, will commence in Venice. Sejima has a long history with the Venice exhibition as she, paired with Ryue Nishizawa, organized the Japanese Pavilion, City of Girls, for the 7th International Architecture Exhibition in 2000 and won the Golden Lion in 2004 for the most significant work of the 9th International Architecture Exhibition.  Now, she will be the first woman to direct the Architecture Sector of the Biennale.  “The twenty-first century has just started. Many radical changes are taking place. In such a rapid-changing context, can architecture clarify new values and a new lifestyle for the present? Hopefully, this show will be a chance to experience the manifold possibilities of architecture, as well as to account for its plurality of approaches, each one of them being a different way of living,” explained Sejima.

More about the Biennale, including a video of Sejima’s introduction, after the break. read more »

Thousands of buildings in the Netherlands lie vacant. Some of them for a week or a few months, many even for years. During the twelfth Venice Architecture Biennale, the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) and Rietveld Landscape will highlight the huge potential of all that temporarily unoccupied space in making the Netherlands one of the top-five knowledge economies in the world. The exhibition Vacant NL, where architecture meets ideas is a call for the intelligent reuse of temporarily vacant buildings around the world in promoting creative enterprise. The Venice Architecture Biennale takes place from 29 August 29 to 21 November 2010.

Built in 1954, the Dutch Pavilion on the biennale grounds in Venice has been empty for over 39 years. After all, it is in use for just three months each year. That makes it one of the thousands of unoccupied government buildings on Dutch soil.

Rietveld Landscape, the office appointed by the NAI to curate the Dutch presentation in Venice, decided to emphasize the vacancy of the pavilion during the architecture biennale. The experience of the empty space will sink into visitors, and only then will they discover the hidden installation.

Fore information go to: www.nai.nl, www.architectureofconsequence.nl, www.rietveldlandscape.com, www.labiennale.org.

The HZ SZ Bi-City Biennale is in full swing (we just featured the Bug Pavilion a few days ago) and the festival’s catchy “‘Bring Your Own Biennale” (BYOB) slogan aims to stimulate “our collective role in the creation of an innovative Bi-City Biennale between Hong Kong and Shenzhen.”  Conversations around the area are focusing on how Hong Kong’s society can make an active imprint on their city’s future.  The BYOB is “at once contextual but also reflective, a unique opportunity to speculate on what our impact on the metropolis could be.”  For the Biennale’s main pavilion, designed by Shiegeru Ban Architects, a paper tube structure provides a semi-open space for events such as forums, workshops and events.

More about the main pavilion after the break.

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International Expert Shows Openness and Potential of Austrian Architecture Culture Minister Claudia Schmied has appointed American star architect Eric Owen Moss as curator for the Austrian exhibit at the Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2010.

Federal Minister Schmied considers Eric Owen Moss an expert with a profound knowledge of Austrian architecture: “Eric Owen Moss has a keen eye for the strengths in Austrian architecture. He is aware of the intensive discourse in the development of architecture and urban planning in our country, which is open to innovative and foreign concepts. He also sees the wide array of excellent architects in Austria, who are creating and building around the world.”

We had the chance to interview Eric earlier this year, and we had a really interesting conversation. Watch the interview here. More on the Austria exhibit after the break. read more »

How and what can architects and urbanistst contribute to the way we live in cities? What is the Open City? How do people work, think, dream and act there? And why is it urgent to re-imagine the Open City?

These are just some of the questions that will confront the visitor to Open City: Designing Coexistence.

The 4th edition of the IABR will take place from 24 September 2009 until 10 January 2010 in Rotterdam and Amsterdam. You can find the program on the official site, including debates, lectures, and theater performances .

As one of the runners for the design and curatorial aspects of a pavilion during the past Venice Biennale, I was very intrigued on how each country will address the theme proposed by Betsky, as “Architecture Beyond Building” is such a powerful call, specially in times when architecture is being able to address problems beyond its traditional scope, after being apart for quite some time.

But sadly, most of the exhibitions were the total opposite. After seeing the pavilions, but most important, what was being exhibited at the pavilions, I think that the answers went on the opposite direction. On the -pessimistic- words of Amanda Baillieu “The Venice Biennale has become reflection of the state architecture is in”… a biennale by architects and for architects, with 0 relation to our society.

But among this panorama, there were a few exhibitions that were up to “architecture beyond building”. One of them was Into the Open: Positioning Practice, the US exhibition curated by William Menking, Aaron Levy, and Andrew Sturm. They selected 16 practices which are working very close to communities, creating new work in response to contemporary social conditions, expanding the conception of architectural practice. People who are answering the question we always ask on our interviews (“What is -or should be- the role of the architect in contemporary society?”) from a unique perspective.

And after this, the curators successfully raise the question: need the end product be a building? More importantly, they ask: need the end be a product?

This questions try to be answered on a video produced by SMAC, highlighting the work of Teddy Cruz, Laura Kurgen, and Rural Studio:

Cruz’s project, Radicalizing the Local: 60 Linear Miles of Transborder Urban Conflict maps the collision between wealth and poverty, the formal and informal city and many other disparities apparent along the 60 miles north and south of the Mexican border at Tijuana and San Diego. Kurgan organizes city data on poverty, infrastructure, criminal activity and prison displacement to ask: what if more resources were spent on investment in housing and infrastructure rather than sending people to prison? Rural Studio’s Animal Shelter is a project carried out by students earning their degrees by assisting the structural development of Hale County, Alabama.

Currently, the New School for Design is hosting the exhibition Into the Open: Positioning Practice until May 1st. You can see more info about that on our previous feature.

Parsons The New School for Design invites you to a conference held in conjunction with the New York presentation of Into the Open: Positioning Practice, the official U.S. Pavilion of the 11th Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. On view through May 1, the exhibition features work by a new wave of architect-activists who are reclaiming a role in shaping community and the built environment. These 16 architectural groups actively engage communities, responding to social and environmental issues, including shifting demographics, changing geo-political boundaries, uneven economic development, and the explosion of urban migration.

The conference on Friday, April 24 will bring together representatives of four of these architectural groups: Teddy Cruz, Deborah Gans, Laura Kurgan, and Rick Lowe, to discuss how the issues explored in the exhibition can translate into and transform contemporary architectural practice. Exhibition curators Aaron Levy (executive director, Slought Foundation) and Bill Menking (founder, The Architect’s Newspaper) will deliver the introduction. Each guest will speak for twenty minutes, followed by an informal conversation with the public triggered by agents provocateurs William Bevington, Jean Gardner, Robert Kirkbride, David J. Lewis, Lydia Matthews, Brian McGrath, Miodrag Mitrasinovic, Raoul Rickenberg, Bob Rubin, Grahame Shane, John Thackara, Sven Travis, Susan Yelavich, and Alfred Zollinger.

Into the Open: Positioning Practice is on view through May 1 in the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons. Hours are Monday-Friday, 10 a.m.-8 p.m. and Saturday -Sunday, noon-6 p.m. Admission is free.

For more information on the exhibition and conference, visit the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center website.

Postopolis! LA has come to an end (at least for 2009). Postopolis! was discussion, debate and reflection around Architecture and a great variety of related topics: Art, City, Technology, Geography, Visualization, etc., which merged into a multidisciplinary conversation broadcasted live by seven different blogs. It’s impossible to resume in a couple of paragraphs what this days in LA were without thinking we suffered a big overdose of information that we need to take the proper time to digest.

Trying to sort out some ideas, I think at least five topics defined these days for us.

The event for itself, that concentrated expositions and discussions about some very interesting and diverse topics. From talks about the city and security with people from the LA Police Department to understand how some cities are reformulating the relation between cities and their citizens through technology, thanks to Ben Cerveny’s exposition. Complete list of everyone who participated can be found here.

In these five days we had the opportunity to interview some of the best exposers of Contemporary Architecture based in LA. Yo-Ichiro Hakomori (wHY Architecture), Dwayne Oyler & Jenny Wu (Oyler Wu Collaborative), Whitney Sander (Sander Architects), Sarah Johnston & Mark Lee (Johnston MarkLee) and Austin Kelly (XTEN Architecture), Eric Oweb Moss (Eric Owen Moss Architects), and some others we will introduce soon.

Of course, being in LA, we were forced to travel through the city and it’s renowned highways. We realized how hard it is to move without owning a vehicle. But we also got to know a friendly side of the city, with many interesting and different central places to visit.

Finally, a special mention for the place where Postopolis! was carried out: The Standard Hotel in Downtown LA, a great renovation of a 13 floor building by Konig Eizenberg Architecture, where it seems that everything was specially design for the hotel which has one of the most interesting rooftops of LA.

At the same time, Postopolis! was part of the LA Art Week, organized by the For Your Art foundation, so we were immersed in a great cultural environment. Finally, our most sincere thanks to everyone who made Postopolis! possible, specially to everyone who works at The Storefront for Art and Architecture (Joseph, Gaia, Cesar, José, Faris), For Your Art (Bettina, Devin, Julia, Melissa), to the folks at the Standard Hotel, each one of the curators: BLDGBLOG (Geoff), City of Sound (Dan), SubTopia (Bryan), Mudd Up! (Jayce a.k.a. dj/Rupture), We Make Money Not Art (Regina) and of course, every guest who gave life to the event. Thanks to all!

Images that try to resume these 5 days in LA, after the break. read more »

Into the Open: Positioning Practice is the official U.S. representation at the 11th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. The exhibition explores how architects, urban researchers, and community activists are meeting the challenges of creating new work in response to contemporary social conditions. The exhibition also addresses factors challenging traditional methods of architecture, such as shifting socio-cultural demographics, changing geo-political boundaries, uneven economic development, and the explosion of migration and urbanization. At the same time, it will advocate for an expanded conception of architectural practice and responsibility. The sixteen practitioners included, all of whom actively engage communities in their work, demonstrate multifaceted responses to social and environmental issues.

Into the Open: Positioning Practice is presented by Parsons The New School for Design, in collaboration with Slought Foundation and PARC Foundation, with media partner Architect’s Newspaper. The exhibition and related public programs are coordinated by Laetitia Wolff of futureflair, and director of strategic alliances at Parsons; with exhibition and graphic design by Ken Saylor and Project Projects.

For more information, fo to the official website of the exhibition, here.

Architect: Felipe Assadi / Assadi + Pulido
Location: Santiago, Chile
Collaborators: Pablo Casals, Francisco Duarte
Project year: 2008
Constructed Area: 400 sqm
Material: Scaffolding, Hunter Douglas aluzinc stripes, Wood
Photos: Felipe Assadi & Nicolás Saieh

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The 11th Venice Biennaleis just around the corner, starting on Sept 14th with a preview on Sept 11th-13th. I´m eager to see the pavillions and installations on the Biennale, specially because the title for this version is “Out There: Architecture Beyond Building” on which Aaron Betsky, the curator, says ” “will point the  way towards an architecture liberated from buildings to engage the central issues of our society; instead of the tombs of architecture, which is to say buildings, it will present site specific installations, visions and experiments that help us figure out, make sense of and feel at home in our modern world”.

One of this installations is “AirXY: From Inmaterial to Rematerial” by M-A-D, an interdisciplinary design firm with primary expertise in branding and visual communications.  From their authors: he airXY screen is folded to seem as if it had burst out of the wall behind. as visitors approach they notice what appears to be a giant checkerboard with a vertical line scanning from left to right. suggesting the surface of an interface, a desktop and a machine simultaneously, on further observation, the visitors see that the composition is, in fact, charting the passing of time along an XY axis divided into 24×60 units. in addition to the vertical line and rectangular XY units, tiny green abstract icons are floating across the screen, looking like runes, contemporary urban signs or the graphic language of circuit diagrams”.

More pictures after the jump.

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