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
In one of a dozen environmental installations spotted through the Italian pavilion and the Arsenale, London architect Ron Arad constructed a video wall whose pixels depicted the vague outlines of an old black-and-white movie (Miracle in Milan, by Vittorio de Sica): solid matter gave way to light, time and story, losing the sense of physical boundary. Conceiving environments filled with effects, many of the biennale architects were designing ephemera.
Individual countries mounted their own shows in their respective national pavilions in the Giardini, and, as always, the diverse concerns of each presentation escaped easy categorization. The Holland pavilion addressed the land-use patterns of a country substantially claimed from the sea, and Belgium, winner of the award for the best national pavilion, analyzed the social coherence of Kinshasa, the capital of their former African colony that is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Brazil took up the issue of cancerous urban growth. Ireland selected a single project, the transformation of a former reform school in Letterfrack, an isolated Atlantic community, by the Irish firm O'Donnell + Tuomey, into a community center and furniture college.
In the U.S. pavilion, a diverse group of architects, chosen by the editors of Architectural Record, exhibited projects ranging from religious and commercial spaces to a stadium nested on a rooftop within an arena of skyscrapers. Sulan Kolatan and William MacDonald, of New York's Kolatan/ MacDonald Studio, presented housing modules plugged into a towering, computer-generated biomorphic frame. Nexia, a material under consideration for its construction, is bioengineered from the genes of a goat and a spider, and is said to be many times stronger than carbon fiber (itself many times the strength of steel). New York architects Reiser + Umemoto undertook a study of that ubiquitous artifact of American culture, the highway, and subjected America's roadways to a series of topographical transformations to show how something as generic as a freeway can acquire unique characteristics.
In announcing architecture's new era, Forster was accurate but not really daring: his observations, though welcome, were in fact late in coming. In 1988, MOMA's "Deconstructivist Architecture" declaratively introduced the era, and more recently, shows at the Landesmuseum in Graz, Austria ("Latent Utopias," October '02-February '03), and the Pompidou Center, Paris ("Non-Standard," December '03-March '04), updated the message and phenomenon, now subject to evolutionary change through the even more widespread use of the computer.
This was a show long overdue in Venice, but at least--and at last--it arrived. More tentative iterations of the ideas in earlier exhibitions have emerged in this presentation as robust facts on the ground, now accessible to a wide audience in a high-profile venue. The era may not be as new as Forster declares, but at least the Biennale has caught up with a field that has been for two decades in the throes of radical self-transformation. Without Forster's better-late-than-never interpretation, the Venice Architecture Biennale would have missed the gondola altogether.
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