05.24.2018
2018 VENICE BIENNALE
IN THE GUARDIAN
Venice Architecture Biennale review – take a seat for the ‘bench biennale’
Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Irish architects Grafton have curated a show that celebrates in-between spaces, with smells, historical treasure troves and – for once – plenty of places to sit
It’s a nice thing to sit down and admire a good view, no more so than after a day spent traipsing through a biennale.
When you reach the far end of the Venetian Arsenale – the sprawling 16th-century naval yard, where the 16,000 workers who once built a warship a day have been replaced by hordes of architecture enthusiasts – the calm of the Gaggiandre is a welcome salve. Rows of brick arches spring from marching colonnades of stone columns, supporting a roof of great timber beams. Low afternoon light floods the scene, reflecting the noble structure of the covered docks in the mirror-calm emerald waters. Five hundred years after the shipyard was built, it is now possible to sit here and take in the view, thanks to a pair of practical Irishwomen who know a good place to put a bench when they see it.
“We always want to sit down when we come to Venice,” says Yvonne Farrell, one half of Grafton, the Dublin architects who have curated this year’s architecture biennale.
Officially titled Freespace, the 2018 edition could equally be the biennale of benches. Along with the huge chunks of marble that Grafton found in storage and hauled into place beside the docks, there are roughly-hewn tree trunks from Spain, woven rattan divans from Mumbai, polished stone seats from Portugal, leather-upholstered benches from Leeds, as well as Peruvian seating made from concrete formwork (complete with built-in phone-charging sockets) and a bench hand-moulded from dollops of Bangladeshi mud.
The welcome proliferation of perches is a direct response to the curators’ manifesto, which emphasises the capacity of architecture to find “additional and unexpected generosity” in each project, stressing the architect’s obligation to provide “gifts” to the wider public beyond the confines of the client’s brief alone. A beautiful wall, in Grafton’s eyes, can give pleasure to a passerby even if they never go inside, as can a glimpse into a courtyard, or a place to lean in the shade or take cover from the rain. It is about harnessing the power of nature’s free gifts too, reminding us how architecture can capture light, a breeze or ripples of water, and exploit the magic of what is already there.
Following a succession of biennales that have shunned the iconic in favour of the everyday, the marginal and the provisional, Grafton celebrate the in-between. The result is a rich body of projects harvested from across the world that devote care to porches, lobbies, passages and stairs, making incidental spaces do more than simply take you from from A to B, or separate inside from out. It is an exhibition revealing the added value that architecture can bring – a broad umbrella, which is also the show’s chief flaw.
London-based Canadian architect Alison Brooks has constructed a tableau of “habitable totems” that recreate in-between moments from some of her buildings, using a clever combination of plywood and mirrors to conjure a curving colonnade, an infinite cloister and a grand vaulted threshold. They are dreamlike fragments that speak of the potential of housing to create moments of delight beyond the dwellings alone.
Los Angeles-based architect Michael Maltzan deploys a similar approach in his intermediate housing project for homeless people, where prefabricated modular units are carefully arranged above an open communal floor. A vast white model reveals the spatial logic behind the design, while intricately furnished rooms depict the apartments as lived-in, with video stories about the lives of the individual residents.
There are other inspiring housing projects along these lines, from Talli Architecture’s “open building” in Helsinki, whose five-metre ceiling heights allow residents to modify their own spaces, to Lacaton & Vassal’s work in France, which demonstrates how a combination of deft spatial juggling and judicious consideration of where to spend limited funds makes all the difference to the residents. These are architects who mine additional “freespace” from the depths of the plan and the cells of the spreadsheet.
Grafton’s definition of architectural generosity extends beyond space to the use of light, smell and touch, making for a show that can be delightfully sensuous. The musty aroma of a great rope curtain fills the first room in the Corderie, recalling the history of the building and preparing the senses for the scents of Australian eucalyptus and Vietnamese bamboo to come. The olfactory climax comes with a dreamy installation by Portuguese maestros Aireus Mateus, who invite you to poke your head inside their faceted black steel UFO to discover an eerie garden of dried flowers.
It is a welcome moment of escapism from the long slog of the Corderie, which feels a little monotonous this year, if not for the quality of the exhibits than for the equivalence with which they are displayed. Each architect has been allotted roughly the same amount of space, corralled either side of a relentless central promenade, giving it all the slight air of a trade show. They would have done better to slash the number of participants and give them each more space and more money; with over 100 architects involved across the two venues, it feels like the resources have been spread too thin.
One practice that is used to making the most of a tight budget is the ingenious Catalan pair Flores & Prats. They have erected a huge replica of part of their Sala Beckett in Barcelona, a conversion of a 1920s workers’ club into a theatre. It co-opts a south-facing window in the Corderie to simulate the way that light falls into their building. Visitors are invited through a sculpted top-lit space to a behind-the-scenes display stuffed with an energetic archive of models and working drawings that reveals their archaeological design process of recording and excavating magical spaces out of the existing structure. Theirs is an architecture that extracts its gifts from the accumulated layers of history latent in every site.
History is ever-present this year, and it adds a richness to the proceedings. Citing the ancient Greek proverb that “society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in”, Grafton have been keen to highlight the annals of architecture as a treasure trove to be liberally raided. For a show dedicated to contemporary architectural practice, there are a refreshing number of gems from the archives, particularly in the central pavilion of the Giardini, which provides an illuminating insight into what makes the Dublin duo tick.
“We think the ability to read the past and make it live in the present is what distinguishes Irish architecture right now,” says Grafton co-founder Shelley McNamara. “We don’t see time as a linear thing, but more like a spiral, where ancient and contemporary coexist.”
After walking across a colourful ceramic-tiled floor, made by Granby Workshop, founded in Liverpool’s deprived Toxteth neighbourhood by young architecture collective Assemble, visitors are immersed in a room of architectural fragments made by a range of Irish architects each tasked with interpreting a key building from history. It’s a nice idea, but the gnomic pieces on show don’t shed much light on what the canon has to offer, instead treading close to the treacherous waters of architects trying to be installation artists.
The curators’ approach to history is more successful when it is more straightforward. One room is devoted to their Swedish hero Sigurd Lewerentz, where the porticoes of three of his chapels have been erected, alongside original drawings. Ghosts of Venice feature in unrealised plans for the city by Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and others, while David Chipperfield pays homage to Prussian neoclassicist Karl Friedrich Schinkel, projecting animated drawings of his grand scenographic spaces on Berlin’s Museum Island. These may be familiar touchstones, but there are lesser-known finds too, including a room devoted to the work of Milanese architect Luigi Caccia Dominioni, whose sinuous, serpentine plans, says McNamara, have added a new ingredient to Grafton’s own work. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Hatz’s display of historical architectural drawings is a revelation, having rifled through a few hundred years of architects putting pen to paper and pinned the diverse finds across the walls.
Ultimately the Irish architects’ most tangible embodiment of their theme comes out in the very fabric of what they have done in Venice, revealing the special qualities of the historic venues themselves. More than any previous curators, they have looked hard at the rambling maze of the central pavilion and made it better, opening up previously closed routes and revealing hidden windows designed by Carlo Scarpa, which connect the galleries to the water outside for the first time in a generation. “We discovered them by chance, after scratching around and going over all the original plans of the building.” says Farrell. “After all, we are architects, not curators.”
