News, reviews, photos, and essays on the Venice Biennale crowd the blogosphere like July tourists in Piazza San Marco. This year’s theme, set by director Aaron Betsky, is Out There: Architecture Beyond Building. Building proposals were eschewed for “icons and enigmas,” and, love it or hate it, the theme is appropriate for a biennial with such an immediate, strong life beyond the physical.
First, an introduction: a welcome, jargon-free, street-level review at Archinect, where Martina Dolejsova walks us through the Biennale’s maze of pavilions, heady discourse, and clashing egos.
Environmentally friendly Treehugger looks at “The Architecture of Purification”: Cloud, the ironic, self-defeating installation by Taiwanese architect An Te Liu, built from 120 constantly-running air purifiers, ionizers, and humidifiers, creates a vaguely-defined cleanspace…but, ponders Treehugger, at what cost?
Inhabitat, another green-design blog, considers Chinese architect Li Xianggang’s Paper-Brick House. Made from stacked reams of paper and cardboard tubes, it emphasizes the importance of solid construction after the Sichuan Earthquake and would make even The Office drones at Dunder Mifflin proud of their product.
A more in-depth look at other pavilions can be found on the excellent art + media blog, We Make Money Not Art, including Gold Lion Award winner for Best National Participation, the Polish Pavilion. Images of recent Polish architecture hang side-by-side with collages imagining how the buildings might appear in a not-too-distant, post-consumer, apocalyptic future. The pavilion itself was temporarily repurposed as a small hotel where visitors could get a brief respite from the arch-inundation.
Finally, a closing shot via AnArchitecture of the Ponte dei Sospiri. One of the most photographed structures in Venice, the “Bridge of Sighs” is under renovation and has been temporarily rebranded / sponsored by a European carmaker. AnArchitecture wonders how often the advertising will infiltrate visitors’ photographs and, subliminally, their vacation memories—an infinite campaign.
Author Jimmy Stamp is a freelance writer and designer with Mark Horton / Architecture in San Francisco. He has been publishing his architecture blog, Life Without Buildings, since 2004 and is a contributing editor at Curbed San Francisco.
Originally published 4th quarter 2008, in arcCA 08.4, “Interiors + Architecture.”
