Architecture Biennale Research Articles

Participation, Housing, and the Question of ‘Good Architecture’

The Tallinn Architecture Biennale ʻRecycling Socialismʼ, held in September 2013, is reviewed in this paper. Key themes and contradictions that crystallised throughout the event are identified and analysed. Participatory approach and its shortcomings are discussed in relation to the Biennaleʼs vision competition winning entry.What is the dual legacy of socialism and modernism for architectural and urban practices? The question is studied via the contrasting practices of raumlabor and DOGMA, two key participants in the Biennaleʼs events. Whereas participation is a goal and an answer to modernist-Fordist city in raumlabor's practice, for DOGMA it is the starting point for interrogating post-Fordist city.

Participation, Housing, and the Question of ‘Good Architecture’

The Tallinn Architecture Biennale ʻRecycling Socialismʼ, held in September 2013, is reviewed in this paper. Key themes and contradictions that crystallised throughout the event are identified and analysed. Participatory approach and its shortcomings are discussed in relation to the Biennaleʼs vision competition winning entry. What is the dual legacy of socialism and modernism for architectural and urban practices? The question is studied via the contrasting practices of raumlabor and DOGMA, two key participants in the Biennaleʼs events. Whereas participation is a goal and an answer to modernist-Fordist city in raumlabor's practice, for DOGMA it is the starting point for interrogating post-Fordist city.

Historicism Versus Communication: The Basic Debate of the 1980 Biennale

AbstractThe first Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980 provided a vital springboard for Post‐Modernism, providing it with an international stage. The Strada Novissima, with its facades by eminent architects of the time, is now a seminal image of 20th‐century architecture. As Léa‐Catherine Szacka explains, the prominence given to the past in the show's theme was a point of contention among the exhibition's organisers. This has had an enduring impact on architectural culture to this day. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Soil and Protoplasm: The Hylozoic Ground Project

AbstractHoused in the Canadian Pavilion in the Giardini in Venice during the 2010 Architecture Biennale, the Hylozoic Ground project provided visitors with the unique experience of interacting with a responsive and ‘live’ textile matrix. Philip Beesley and Rachel Armstrong describe the extraordinary ‘soil‐less’ environment that they collaborated on and how it provides a new model for a synthetic but evolutionary ecology. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Altered States of Preservation: <i>Preservation</i> by OMA/AMO

Altered States of Preservation: Preservation by OMA/AMO Teresa Stoppani (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution OMA, "Cronocaos," as exhibited at the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale (2010). Photography by Teresa Stoppani. [End Page 96] Preservation was the title of OMA/AMO's 1 main contribution to the Twelfth Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale (29 August through 21 November 2010). Rem Koolhaas, the practice principal and founder, was awarded the Biennale's Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, and he continues to surprise us with his foresight. Always at the forefront of the architectural debate at the Biennale, Koolhaas's attention concentrates on the existing, on the traces and remainders of past and present architectures (as well as nonarchitectures, or, more generally, the built environment) that the designer has to confront today, ubiquitously, on different scales and with different cultural and intellectual approaches. While at the pre-Great-Recession Venice Architecture Biennale of 2006 OMA/ AMO had shown master plans for new islands in the Persian Gulf, in 2010 the global practice concentrated on a given world of near and remote pasts, on which today's architects are called to express judgement. The scenario in which architects operate today—which might be dubbed the "new old"—is a palimpsest of different thicknesses and resiliences possibly subject to violent erasures and heretical insertions. 2 Inside the Palazzo delle Esposizioni—in the same rooms occupied in 2006 by Dubai's optimistic developments prior to the financial crisis—OMA/AMO presented a vision for the future of the past that challenges chronologies and questions established definitions of architectural preservation. While the theme of preservation is (relatively) new for OMA, the approach and the presentation styles used here are signature OMA: from the manifesto (on this occasion, AMO's redefinition of contemporary "preservation"); to rich visuals of the practice's projects cleverly mixed with photographic documentation of the existing; to sharp slogan-like captions and quotations; to graphically striking statistics, graphs, and time charts; to a fetishistic, metonymic collection of rescued furniture and found objects. Unlike OMA's other visual arguments, branding narratives, and cultural provocations, this sensitive subject, which OMA'S exhibition only superficially skims, is complex, multifaceted, and deadly serious. It is not only the survival of built structures that is of concern here, or indeed that of the architectural discipline itself—long probed, challenged, pulled, and stretched in all directions by OMA/AMO in recent years (the practice's palindromic acronym a telling symptom of their fluidity of [End Page 97] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 98] approach to a professional role in constant redefinition). What is at stake here is the survival of the whole world as we know it, and us with it. But the concern in OMA's vision remains specifically architectural. No green or otherwise-colored visions are proposed but rather a polemical reality check that exposes a "now" engulfed in strategies of preservation that are more politics and market driven than they are the expression of environmental (and environmentalist) or cultural and architectural concerns. Organized in two rooms, the exhibition proposes different interpretations of the topic of preservation. The first room documents the "conditions found by OMA upon arrival at sites of possible preservation, 1969-2010" 3 and offers a sampling of OMA's past and present interventions on the existing. The selected works vary in scale, purpose, and chronology: from the 1980 study for the renovation of the Koepel Panopticon prison in Arnhem; to the vast orange cushion for the lift space of the 1998 Maison à Bordeaux, declared a French "monument historique" in 2001 and reduced to an "empty vessel" after the death of its owner; to the original furniture of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, currently undergoing strategic renovation by OMA and Herzog and de Meuron; to glass and miniatures from the curatorially re-master planned Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg (2008-14); to the books containing the current "cultural master plan" and concept design for the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice, reinvented as "a culturally programmed department store (2010)." This first exhibition room opens questions. This time, Koolhaas's retroactive manifesto is not applied to the found...