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
The most robust section of the biennale was at the Arsenale. A special section about cities on the water, called "Citta di Acqua," was held in a chain of floating barge pavilions under the roofs of one of the shipyard's docks. Elsewhere in the Arsenale, Forster divided the cavernous halls into successive themes, including "Transformations," "Topography," "Surfaces," "Hyper-Projects" and "Atmosphere." Rashid and Couture, who were highly influential in formulating the concept of the show, designed display components, dubbed "gondolas," that embodied the thesis of change. Designing with computers, the architects conceived a series of warped display tables, each different from the last, and all stretched to elegant attenuation. The feathering tips lifted at either end, cantilevering toward walls that were curved in plan. The computer helped the architects shape and calculate the forms of the gondolas for serial differentiation, the profiles mutating from one to the next. Of course, these podiums did not literally resemble the gondolas in the canals outside, except in very general terms--their sweeping curves and elevated tips. But the computer is itself a liquid medium that, in the hands of Rashid and Couture, produced hydrodynamic results, and Asymptote's gondolas resonated deeply with the Venetian environment without being mimetic.
Presented as models held aloft on thin steel supports over Asymptote's white display tables or in drawings on the walls, scores of other designs succeeded one another, manifesting various forms of mutation. For an underground car park in Basel designed by New York's Acconci Studio, the ribbons of the roof, designed as a kind of urban plaza, ripple in non-repeating waves whose openings flood the parking lot below in light. Thom Mayne of Santa Monica's Morphosis (he just received the 2005 Pritzker Prize) proposed for New York's bid for the 2012 Olympics a housing complex built of vertical and horizontal skyscrapers that virtually squirm across the waterfront site in Queens in rotating forms that define open parks, themselves shaped in shifting mounds. The high-rise Landesbank in Hannover, Germany, by Behnisch, Behnisch & Partner, breaks apart the conventional monolithic office tower into a series of office cubes that project irregularly off the service core. All parts are equally diverse and none dominant. With a series of photographic exhibits, Forster looked beyond form to aura to explain architecture in the throes of transitory effects--as Turner did in his sublime sketches of Venice. "The play of reflective and dull surfaces, varying degrees of transparency, and instable light conditions can impart a sense of autonomous life to otherwise inert buildings," writes Forster in the catalogue. Photographers captured plays of light and rain on materials like frosted glass and perforated metals. (The photo presentations were organized by Nanni Baltzer.)
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