The Influence of Temporality: Exhibiting Architecture and the Prospect of Immediacy of Discipline at the Venice Biennale (original) (raw)
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Presented at the Mediated City Conference, 2014 in Los Angeles, 2014
TOWARDS A CHRONOTOPOS is a paper presented at the THE MEDIATED CITY CONFERENCE, 2014 in Los Angeles. “Architectures that were once specific and local have become interchangeable and global; national identity has seemingly been sacrificed to modernity”, Rem Koolhaas states in his role as director of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2014. With this paper we describe a challenging force to this state of modernity in the form of a critical commentary on our exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2014 where we examine transitory moments of and in architecture. More in particular, we explore the possibilities of the continuation of historical experiential spatial qualities through a practice of replay; in this particular case by using drawing and film.
Fundamentals: Expressing Modern Architecture at Biennale Venice 2014
Handbook on Emerging Trends in Scientific Research ISBN: 978-969-9952-07-4, 2016
The Biennale held at Venice this year exhibit a strong intellectual challenge inaugurated by the curator Rem Koolhaas. The-Theme‖ for the 14 th cycle is-Fundamentals‖ in Art and Architecture. This theme will be presented by 40 different countries in the national pavilions. The major issue to be presented this year which is different than other years will be according to Koolhaas, the representation of-architecture‖ rather than-architects‖. In addition to this, the main theme for the National Pavilions, which will be the main focus of this paper, is the expression of architecture in different nations during the past 100 years, from 1914-2014. This will be discussed in the shadows of the dilemma of Modernism and National Regionalism. Going through the different stages of understanding ‗national' architecture, World Wars, Modernism and then globalization, the theme represents an important challenge for each contributor to express the evolution of architecture in their nations. The paper will be divided into two parts. First is a brief review of the emergence of Modernism and the International dimensions affecting its spread in different communities. Second is the documentation of the Theme of the Biennale, as well as the contributions of a selection of countries. Following that will be analysis of those contributions in relation to the theme as well as to the analysis of two main contributors from the Middle East. The paper concludes by a discussion related to the intellectual outcomes of the contributions and their relation with the national history and Modernism. This conclusion will shed light on how countries in the Middle East precisely relate to the dilemma of representation in the shadows of Modernity.
Livable Environments and Architecture International Congress, LIVENARCH VII- Other Architectures Proceedings Vol. III, 2021
In the late 60s and 70s, while artists used architectonic forms in exhibitions, architects pursued the artistic category of installations as a form of architectural production and proposed new spatial conditions for more socially-oriented practices. This “other” practice that is defined as “making (for) the exhibition”, ascribes a flat ontology to disciplinary concepts, processes and techniques, while bringing out the repetition or resemblance of spatial works in large-scale visual art or architecture exhibitions and pointing out their insignificant categorization today. “Art-architecture coupling” that refers to a field beyond visual arts and architecture, necessitates a redefinition of its practitioners and categories which are aimed to be represented in this paper referring to Peter Osborne and Eric Alliez’s characterization of the “transdisciplinary” and “transcategorial” works of artistic practice. An emphasis on the processual and performative character of exhibition as a “project” suspends the object/subject or work/viewer division and assigns them an “agency” in equal terms. Yet, their distributed agencies within the relational assemblage of the exhibition are brought into question drawing upon the concept of “quasi-object” in Michel Serres and Bruno Latour’s terms, and how quasi-objects of art-architecture performs in the transformation or re assembling of the dynamic social space, such as an exhibition, is opened to discussion. This paper recalls Venice Biennale, and a peculiar historical moment of its decentralization from the academic arts, having a social orientation with the articulation of visual arts and architecture in mid 1970s. As a transversal project, the case of the 1975 Mulino Stucky exhibition that marks the art-architecture coupling in the Biennale history, is reassessed through archival visual documents deciphering material and social relations of its performative processes, established by different conceptualizations and materializations of the quasi-objects in exhibit.
ARTMargins, 2015
This article comparatively discusses the 14th International Architecture Biennale of Venice, directed by Rem Koolhaas, and the pilot exhibit and architectural design of Louvre Abu Dhabi undertaken by Jean Nouvel, in the context of recent big art events and world museums. Curatorial, historiographical, and installation strategies in these venues are differentiated in order to think through the question of displaying a global history of architecture. I make a distinction between the curatorial practices carried out in the Fundamentals and Absorbing Modernity sections of Venice's Central and National Pavilions as curator-as-author and curators-as-chorus, which I map onto recent historiographical and museum design practices, including the Louvre Abu Dhabi, to discuss the geopolitical implications of its installation strategies. I also argue that six methodological perspectives for displaying architectural history emerge from the curator-chorus of Absorbing Modernity, which can be id...
Civil Engineering and Architecture, 2020
The physical environment generates myriad of values and comprises various connotations. These values and connotations, which are directly or indirectly represented by the output, generate a sampling area to understand the production and consumption forms of the physical environment, of its cultural, social and economic priorities and contextual relations. Therefore, architecture is utilized as a tool to understand the historical transformations and relations in various disciplinary fields while architectural criticism tries to understand the architectural building process and its outcome by exceeding its professional boundaries and observing the relationships between different disciplines and architectures. Literature, art, philosophy, politics are alternative means of expression, which complement architectural criticism. In this context, architectural biennials perform as periodical discussion platforms, which perform as an alternative space for the criticism and documentation of the current issues of architectural production and its most dire problems through a selection of works under a certain theme. The works exhibited at the biennial use different tools of narration in various disciplinary bases in addition to architecture itself, and therefore create an environment for generating content and values with multiple inputs for discussions as well as concepts defining the architectural outcome. In this paper, it aimed to discuss and evaluate the accumulation of works exhibited at the biennial with various contextual and conceptual arguments and interpretations, and the boundaries of functionalization of biennial exhibitions as a platform for architecture criticism.
program - abstracts: Constructions / Identitites: Pavilions, Art, Architecture
Since the early 1990s, the Biennale of Architecture shares the national pavilions of the Giardini di Castello with the art exhibition. A legacy of 19th century World Fairs, the use of the pavilion as a site for exhibiting art and architecture becomes, during the 20th century, an issue of sensationalism in architecture, urban renewal and revision of national identity. Today, only World Fairs and the Venice art and architecture biennials have kept the national pavilions structure. In the case of the Venice Biennials, the system assumes particular connotations, firstly because of the situation in Venice, a "maquette-city" that is already an open-air architectural exhibition in itself, and secondly, because of the permanence of the national pavilions. Thus, in addition to showing the projects of the current edition, the Venice Biennale is also a living archive of architecture as a form of cultural production.
The Architect as Performer? On the Interdisciplinary nature of the Venice Biennale
Starting from Venice, Clarissa Ricci (Ed.), 2011
In his 1962 book The Structural Transformation of Public Sphere, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas described the emergence, transformation, and disintegration of the public sphere in the late eighteenth century and in the beginning of the nineteenth century in France, Germany and England. After giving a brief summery of Habermas' theory on the public sphere, this paper will attempt to draw a parallel between these ideas (generally applied to literature, art and politics) and the development of the architectural exhibitions presented by the Venice Biennale between 1968 and 2006. In other words, this paper will aim to see whether there is such a thing as an "architectural public sphere" and, if so, will try to determine how this particular type of public sphere had evolved in the last 40 years.
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Few historical investigations have accomplished the dual task of writing the history of a significant postmodern architectural moment while simultaneously unpacking its defining theoretical concepts. Maybe that historical period is still too close to our own. Or perhaps documenting an ouroboric movement such as postmodernism, one that centered on history and the revial of architectural styles, is itself the problem.