As part of ArchDaily's coverage of the 2016 Venice Biennale, we are presenting a series of articles written by the curators of the exhibitions and installations on show.
As a response to the 15th International Architecture Exhibition’s challenging theme, Portugal presents a “site-specific” pavilion, occupying an urban front in physical and social regeneration on the island of Giudecca: Campo di Marte. In actual fact, the installation of the pavilion on-site triggered the completion of Campo di Marte’s urban project designed by the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza thirty years ago.
To many, it might seem that the goals of Alejandro Aravena's 2016 Venice Biennale—as he describes it, "to understand what design tools are needed to subvert the forces that privilege the individual gain over the collective benefit"—are beyond reproach. In spite of these aims, a number of commentators nevertheless have emerged, perhaps led most vocally by Patrik Schumacher, criticizing the biennale. In this article, originally published on The Architecture Foundation's website as "Holier than thou," Phineas Harper responds to those criticisms.
The most surprising turn of the 2016 Venice Biennale was not the exhibition itself, but the reaction of its critics. Within hours of kick-off, the internet was filling up with derogatory mutterings of the show being '"worthy," "moralizing," "holier than thou," "earnest," "virtue-signaling" and "right on" (which apparently is an insult). The architectural Twitterati, it seemed, were unimpressed.
But what exactly were they hating on? The biennale principally exhibited practices which saw some form of suffering in the world and, through their work, in way or another, were trying to lessen it. How did such a compassionate brief generate such a miserly push-back?
Herzog & de Meuron's ten-storey extension to London's Tate Modern, which officially opens to the public this week, is the latest in a series of ambitious building projects pursued by the internally renowned gallery of contemporary art. Sitting above The Tanks, the world's first dedicated galleries for live art and film installations, the building's pyramidical form provides 60% more exhibition space for the institution. Two days before its doors welcome art-lovers from around the world, photographer Laurian Ghinitoiu has captured a collection of unique views on this highly anticipated addition to London's skyline.
As director of the 2016 Venice Biennale, Alejandro Aravena has sought to shift the very grounds of architecture. Rather than an inward-looking interrogation of the profession's shortcomings, as Rem Koolhaas undertook in 2014, the Chilean Pritzker Prize-winner asks us to gaze in the opposite direction—to the vast swathes of the built horizon that traditionally lay beyond the profession's purview: urban slums, denatured megacities, conflict zones, environmentally compromised ports, rural villages far off the grid.
"We believe that the advancement of architecture is not a goal in itself but a way to improve people’s quality of life," states Aravena in his introduction to event. In other words, his biennale does not ask what architecture ought, yet often fails, to be, but rather what it could, yet often forgets, to do.
As part of ArchDaily's coverage of the 2016 Venice Biennale, we are presenting a series of articles written by the curators of the exhibitions and installations on show.
Britain is suffering from a terrible housing crisis – one that is an incredibly predictable outcome of decades of neoliberal economic policy. The Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena has become well-known for building “half a house” – only completing core infrastructure in social housing, then encouraging residents to finish the other half with their own money over time. In effect, the first generation get a significantly cheaper home, but once the house has been doubled it could be sold at market rate. The discount, and profit, only applies to the original owners.
As the first South American selected to curate the Biennale, Alejandro Aravena was excited as he delivered the latest news on “Reporting from the Front,” the XV International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, which opened its doors to the public on May 28:
“The Biennale, the invited architects, as well as the curators, did not intend to do anything other than open a debate in which architecture can be used to improve quality of life through the sharing of knowledge. This debate holds more significance since we are speaking at the Presidential Palace because it conveys the message that these issues are important. Thank you so much for the opportunity and the chance to be here.”
The President’s presence at an event like this is a symbol that consolidates a chapter of progress and achievements in Chilean architecture. In the last two decades, Chilean architecture has positioned itself in the world as a force to be recognized, and Chilean architects are now obtaining international recognition, which would have been unimaginable a few years ago.
https://www.archdaily.com/788468/from-chile-to-the-world-reporting-from-the-venice-biennale-2016Pola Mora
This video is part of a partnership between ArchDaily and the Spanish photographer Jesús Granada. Granada's stock images of the Biennale can be obtained on his website, here. ArchDaily’s complete coverage of the 2016 Biennale can be found, here; with coverage focused on the Spanish Pavilion, here.
In an interview conducted by Jesús Granada, the curators of this year’s Spanish Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale, Iñaqui Carnicero and Carlos Quintáns, discuss their reasoning and intentions for the Golden Lion awarded national pavilion’s design. Titled “Unfinished,” Quintáns describes the project’s influence as “the detection of reality that we show only through photography, of what happened (in Spain) after the housing bubble, first the real estate boom and then the crisis, and how we can offer solutions thanks to the many talented architects of the many projects which have been realized in Spain and have been partially obscured.” The pavilion answers Director Alejandro Aravena’s call for national pavilions that identify domestic responses to architectural dilemmas that could be the solutions for other places facing similar issues.
As part of ArchDaily's coverage of the 2016 Venice Biennale, we are presenting a series of articles written by the curators of the exhibitions and installations on show. Here, Arielle Blonder, one of the curators (along with Dr. Ido Bachelet, Bnaya Bauer, Dr. Yael Eylat Van-Essen and Noy Lazarovich) of the Israeli Pavilion, gives us an insight into one of the exhibited works in the pavilion: LifeObject, "a freestanding structure inspired by a 3D scan of a bird's nest." The essay was originally published in LifeObject: Merging Biology and Architecture.
A matter of resilience: LifeObject is an architectural installation, which transposes the resilient properties of a bird’s nest, through scientific analysis, into a spatial form rich with new architectural perspectives. At the core of the installation are free-form volumetric airy surfaces undulating in space that are composed out of over 1500 slender and light components, inspired by twigs; relying on tension only, they form a light-weight, porous and resilient structure. TheLifeObject combines smart, composite and biological materials in the formation of a ‘living structure’ that responds to its environment. Human presence around it triggers the opening of ‘cabinet de curiosités’, revealing a variety of innovative biological elements to visitors.
The LifeObject materializes a series of abstract ideas, preoccupations and potentials in present and future architectural field. The concepts proposed by the structure sketch alternative formal and structural languages informed by external disciplines. It hints at future applications and integration of biologically inspired materials that originate from various settings, scales and orientation.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which opened in 1959, was controversial for being “less a museum than it is a monument to Frank Lloyd Wright.” Although Wright intended to display paintings on the curved interior walls of the central open space, the concave walls made it unworkable. Instead, the central atrium became a place for procession and the uncovering of space through movement. The continuous ramp overlooking the atrium allows people to interact from different levels.
Photographer Laurian Ghinitoiu places people at the core of his photography which perhaps explains how, in this photoset of the Guggenheim Museum to mark Wright's 149th birthday, he captured the essence and vitality of the Guggenheim Museum. While some images depict the museum’s atrium as a place for passing-by, wandering or socializing, others grasp the growing influence of photography and self-representation on visitors’ experience. Some shots also show the building in its urban context with people involved in daily life activities.
Earlier today, the 17th Serpentine Gallery Pavilionwas unveiled with a press preview ahead of its public opening this Friday. With its 13-meter tall "unzipped wall" of square fiberglass tubes, the pavilion is an impressive presence in Hyde park, standing next to the single-story Serpentine Gallery. As described by Bjarke Ingels in his design statement, the pavilion is all about its visual effects from various angles - going from an expansive, transparent rectangle when viewed from the side, and an opaque, curving sculptural shape when seen from either end.
With so much visual intrigue, the project offers plenty to be explored through photography - and accordingly, photographer Laurian Ghinitoiu was there at the opening to investigate the project's visual effects. He also captured the pavilion's neighboring Summer Houses, by Kunlé Adeyemi of NLÉ, Barkow Leibinger, Yona Friedman and Asif Khan. Read on to see the gallery.
Pezo von Ellrichshausen’s Vara Pavilion for the 2016 Venice Biennale is described by the architects as “a series of exteriors within other exteriors.” Breaking down this crypticness, what emerges is a maze-like complex of circles – ten of them – formed with steel, cement, and painted plaster, which collectively create a series of walls, but no roof, thus forming a pavilion that is open to the elements from above. The 324 square meter pavilion’s title, “vara,” refers to an imprecise and obsolete Spanish unit of measurement, that was employed during the country’s conquering of America to trace and measure cities. Each of circles of the Vara Pavilion is a diameter of the unit, ranging from two to eleven.
There is an enormous intensity of information, knowledge and ideas on display at this year's Venice Architecture Biennale, Reporting From the Front. With all the Executive Editors and Editors-in-Chief of ArchDaily's platforms in English, Spanish and (Brazilian) Portuguese in Venice for the opening of the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale—plus co-founder David Basulto and European Editor-at-Large James Taylor-Foster, who curated this year's Nordic Pavilion—we've pooled together twelve of our initial favourite exhibitions and must-see shows.
https://www.archdaily.com/788809/12-things-you-need-to-see-at-the-2016-venice-biennale-reporting-from-the-front-selection-oneAD Editorial Team
Courtesy of Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes
As part of ArchDaily's coverage of the 2016 Venice Biennale, we are presenting a series of articles written by the curators of the exhibitions and installations on show.
Against the tide presents the efforts of a generation of young architects who have conceived, designed, and constructed works of architecture, while also arranging their financial and contractual aspects as part of the requirements for their professional degree in architecture. All they have in common is that they belong to the Central Valley of Chile, where they have returned following their academic training to contribute to their communities, creating architectural projects which connect to a set of places where the region’s campesinos and their families can live and work.
At the opening of the 2016 Venice Biennale, ArchDaily and PLANE—SITE had the unique opportunity to interview Carlos Quintáns & Iñaqui Carnicero and ask them about "UNFINISHED"—an exhibition that uncovers design strategies that take an optimistic view of the built environment. This idea of exhibiting architecture that revels in the patina acquired through the passage of time and that shows how architects have learned from Spain's recent economic crisis earned the Pavilion the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. The jury cited Quintáns & Carnicero's "concisely curated selection of emerging architects whose work shows how creativity and commitment can transcend material constraints."
To see the video with subtitles, make sure that the "CC" button is selected.
Bricks are an iconic element of Solano Benítez’s studio. An ancestral material, forged by man using an ancient technique of modeling and baking. Bricks are very versatile, cheap and easy to manufacture – even marginalized areas of the world can afford to build houses with brick. Benítez feels the poetry of brick and has experimented with its versatility, relying solely on bricks as the main construction material. [1]
Gabinete de Arquitectura's exhibition, designed by Solano Benítez, Gloria Cabral and Solanito Benítez, was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Participant in the International Exhibition, Reporting From the Front, for “harnessing simple materials, structural ingenuity and unskilled labour to bring architecture to underserved communities.”
As part of ArchDaily's coverage of the 2016 Venice Biennale, we are presenting a series of articles written by the curators of the exhibitions and installations on show.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, and increasingly since 9/11 and the “War on Terror” that followed, warfare has moved into the city.
While the wars of the 20th century were waged largely between nations, over territorial sovereignty and along disputed borders, the wars of the 21st century are internal and borderless. They are fought between large multinational coalitions and insurgent networks.
https://www.archdaily.com/788422/blue-architecture-of-un-peacekeeping-missions-inside-the-netherlands-pavilion-at-the-2016-venice-biennaleAD Editorial Team
As part of ArchDaily's coverage of the 2016 Venice Biennale, we are presenting a series of articles written by the curators of the exhibitions and installations on show.
You are part of another’s shadow. —Sverre Fehn in conversation with Per Olaf Fjeld
A central impetus for this exhibition is to acknowledge the presence of the ‘ghosts’ of Nordic architecture – those architects, theorists and educators—the most famous of which are often described as ‘Modern Masters’—who continue to exert influence on contemporary practice and pedagogy. Indeed, one of the most prominent of these gures, the Norwegian Sverre Fehn, designed the Nordic Pavilion. This exhibition addresses a common challenge faced by Finns, Norwegians and Swedes today: how can a building (or an exhibition, in this instance) exist in a dialogue with its setting when that setting is so charged? For us, this ties into a broader question: how can architecture occupy a legacy while still making progress?
As part of ArchDaily's coverage of the 2016 Venice Biennale, we are presenting a series of articles written by the curators of the exhibitions and installations on show.
Of the few dozen articles on architecture and urbanism I have contributed to the Korea Joongang Daily, it was the one entitled “The FAR Game” that received the biggest response from readers. While FAR (Floor Area Ratio) appears to be technical jargon for professionals, it seems that almost every Korean either knows what it is, or has heard about it. If you type yong-jeong-nyul (용적률, the Korean word for FAR) on Korean search engines, an endless stream of news, articles, and commentary pops up. The word speaks to the hunger for living space in a hyper-dense environment, as well as the desire to satisfy that hunger by any means possible, whether by proper planning and tactics or through trickery and obfuscation. It touches both the rich and the poor, the white-collar and the blue-collar, as they navigate their lives together in and around the urban fabric. Upon reading that article, where I had stated that without a doubt it is FAR that drives the architectural character of Korean cities, a renowned urban researcher told me I had hit the nail right on the head.
https://www.archdaily.com/787866/why-the-far-floor-area-ratio-game-inside-koreas-pavilion-at-the-2016-venice-biennaleSung Hong KIM
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.jpg?1464585654 "NEIGHBOURHOOD: Where Alvaro meets Aldo / Curators Nuno Grande and Roberto Cremascoli. Portuguese Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale. Images © Laurian Ghinitoiu.")
.jpg?1464585766 "NEIGHBOURHOOD: Where Alvaro meets Aldo / Curators Nuno Grande and Roberto Cremascoli. Portuguese Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale. Images © Laurian Ghinitoiu.")
.jpg?1464585726 "NEIGHBOURHOOD: Where Alvaro meets Aldo / Curators Nuno Grande and Roberto Cremascoli. Portuguese Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale. Images © Laurian Ghinitoiu.")
.jpg?1464585648 "NEIGHBOURHOOD: Where Alvaro meets Aldo / Curators Nuno Grande and Roberto Cremascoli. Portuguese Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale. Images © Laurian Ghinitoiu.")
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.jpg?1465929504 "NLÉ's Makoko Floating School at the 2016 Venice Biennale. Image © Laurian Ghinitoiu")
.jpg?1465929550 "Gabinete de Arquitectura’s “Breaking the Siege” – Winner of the Golden Lion. Image © Laurian Ghinitoiu")
.jpg?1465929568 "UNFINISHED, curated by Iñaqui Carnicero & Carlos Quintáns, the winner of the Golden Lion for a national contribution (Spanish Pavilion). Image © Laurian Ghinitoiu")
.jpg?1465929535 "In Therapy, curated by David Basulto and James Taylor Foster (Nordic Pavilion). Image © Laurian Ghinitoiu")
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.jpg?1465998696 "© Laurian Ghinitoiu")
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.jpg?1465854457 "The \"Reporting From the Front\" exhibition. Image © Laurian Ghinitoiu")
.jpg?1465854487 "Gabinete de Arquitectura's contribution to the \"Reporting From the Front\" exhibition. Image © Laurian Ghinitoiu")
.jpg?1465854604 "The Spanish Pavilion. Image © Laurian Ghinitoiu")
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.jpg?1464850424 "© Laurian Ghinitoiu")
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.jpg?1464426433 "BLUE: Architecture of Peacekeeping Missions. Image © Laurian Ghinitoiu")
.jpg?1464426519 "BLUE: Architecture of Peacekeeping Missions. Image © Laurian Ghinitoiu")
.jpg?1464426543 "BLUE: Architecture of Peacekeeping Missions. Image © Laurian Ghinitoiu")
.jpg?1464426508 "BLUE: Architecture of Peacekeeping Missions. Image © Laurian Ghinitoiu")
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.jpg?1464398167 "The pyramid, built from Swedish pine, represents an inhabitable installation – an urban artefact in a very public pavilion. Image © Laurian Ghinitoiu")
.jpg?1464398454 "Intimate \"Rooms Without Walls\" sit next to the main installation. Image © Laurian Ghinitoiu")
.jpg?1464398583 "The pyramid is a \"discourse machine,\" designed to allow people to critically discuss the issues at the heart of the exhibition in an open air environment. Image © Laurian Ghinitoiu")
.jpg?1464398159 "The pyramid exists in dialogue with the building. Here, it's relationship with the existing staircase is made apparent. Image © Laurian Ghinitoiu")
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