Venetian morphology: the visual fluidity of Venice was reflected in a show of Turner's watercolors and the city's latest building-design biennial
Art in America, May, 2005 by Joseph Giovannini
By a unique act of esthetic photosynthesis, Venice has over the centuries converted wealth into lasting architectural beauty. But in the 25 years that Venice has played host to architecture biennales, there has always been a disconnect between the dreamy Gothic quality of that watery city and the hard-edged designs of the international avant-gardists who exhibit there. Venice as a city has seemed irrelevant, a storied artifact of a Romantic past that serves merely as a decorous backdrop for an event geared toward utopian futures.
This past fall, an exhibition independent of the biennale made the connective leap between historic Venice and contemporary architecture. At the Museo Correr on the Piazza San Marco, in a complement to the big architecture roundup, "Turner and Venice" displayed scores of watercolors taken from the notebooks of the 19th-century English master. They brilliantly capture--much better than the larger, comparatively labored and inert oils that were also on display--the range of ephemeral effects that routinely hypnotize visitors to La Serenissima.
In a figure-ground reversal, Turner sketched reflections, fires, fogs, rains and all the variations of the Venetian sky--sunrises, sunsets and majestic cloudscapes--rather than the buildings that have usually compelled artists' gazes. Watercolor is, of course, the ideal medium in which to portray a liquid city bathed in intense Mediterranean light. In the transparency of watercolor, the thin veils of color lapping the underlying white paper capture the city's luminosity. Anyone who saw "Turner and Venice," or acquires the beautifully printed catalogue, will never look at Venice with the same eyes again.
Since the event's inception in 1980, organizers of the architecture biennales have always strained for a comprehensive theme that will embrace unruly designs that don't fit tidy categories. But this biennale, bearing the overall title "Metamorph," managed to convincingly isolate and substantiate one of the most salient themes of contemporary architecture: the notion that the only constant in our post-classical world of accelerating change is change itself.
From concept to materials and their epiphenomenal effects, architects now eschew the historicist designs that were prominent at the first architecture biennale, titled "The Presence of the Past." As we saw in scores of models and attendant drawings in the biennale's latest edition, architects today increasingly subscribe to an Einsteinian interpretation of reality, in which mass is conceived as a form of energy. Buildings are broken and segmented into parts, their curves launched into shifting, relational fields; the resulting structures are to be understood through the experience of a promenade.
Conceived and curated by the noted scholar and international curator Kurt Forster, and installed by New York architects Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture of Studio Asymptote, the show announced what Forster called "a new architectural era." More than 300 firms from dozens of countries participated in the event that has become both a snapshot of the current state of the art and a forum propelling change.
According to Forster, there are no universal truths ordering buildings into Newtonian constellations, structuring predictable, unchanging relationships of the parts. Buildings today are not visually fixed in place by geometry. Their parts evolve in a kinetic parallax of curves and angles that create a shifting perceptual spectacle. This new architecture is not about the axes and centers of traditional composition, nor the clean, simple, reductive forms of modernism, conceived and calibrated for systematic factory production; rather, today's forward-looking buildings acknowledge and even cultivate the incidental and accidental, the unique and individual.
The map of the architecture biennale (like that of the visual arts biennale) has expanded. Besides occupying the many national pavilions in the Giardini, the show extended to the antique naval shipyards known as the Arsenale, where sections of the art biennale have long been held. In the Giardini, most of the national pavilions did not fall under Forster's curatorship; the exception was the very large Italian pavilion, where Forster presented a show devoted to a single building type, the concert hall. Dozens of such structures have been built or proposed over the last decade in many countries, including four in China. By examining the same building type, Forster's show facilitated a comparison of work by widely divergent offices. The roiling curves of Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Hall [see A.i.A., Nov. '04], first displayed at the biennale more than a decade ago and featured again this time around, a year after its completion, have been internalized in the work of many architects, including Toyo Ito and Andrea Branzi, who have designed a concert hall for Ghent, Belgium, with a continuously involuted interior of bubbles opening to one another in an environment of linked curves.
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