At the end of the thirteenth century, a Venetian, billed as the most widely travelled man since the Creation, produced a work that promised to introduce his audience to all the marvels and peculiarities of the world. That work has now attained the distinction of being one of the most unread classics of European literature.
These days Marco Polo’s billing would fit
almost any of the über-curators whose pursuit of air miles and artworks
culminate in the numerous biennials, festivals and other art fairs that
litter exhibition halls around the world. For over 700 years, travel has
stood as a guarantor of wisdom, authenticity and taste. So, in time-honoured
fashion, Deyan Sudjic, director of this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale,
has scoured the globe to bring us Next: the future of world architecture (8
September – 3 November 2002), a selection of over 100 key projects that
represent the coming ten years of architecture. While this is a time scale
that reflects the speed at which architecture often operates, it also begs
the question of what the next director is going to do in two years’ time.
Given the recent revelation that 88 per
cent of the British public are unable to name a living architect*,
international architecture exhibitions seem destined to suffer the same fate
as Polo’s literary classic. Everyone hears something about them, but they
have little genuine popular appeal. The staff at Venice’s Marco Polo airport
will not be worrying about invasion by a hoard of Britons when the
exhibition opens this September. Deyan Sudjic is worrying about how to make
architecture more accessible.
It is perhaps with this in mind that Sudjic, a Briton, has opted to take a different approach to that of his predecessor, Massimiliano Fuksas, whose Less Aesthetics, More Ethics Biennale was driven by ideas and focused on the city. Where two years ago the exhibition, centred on a massive video wall, celebrated the technological (for which read virtual) and encouraged many participants to indulge in the fantasy that they were part of the other more celebrated Venice Biennale (with often singularly unpleasant consequences), Next focuses on building as the end product of architectural thought. That, after all, is how architects are supposed to communicate – in this exhibition, the art is left to David Hockney and Richard Serra.
As part of this back-to-basics approach,
Next will feature scale models and the occasional full-size material
prototype (notably from Toyo Ito, co-designer of this year’s Summer Pavilion
at London’s Serpentine Gallery, and Future Systems). The projects on display
are grouped into ten different building types: housing, museums, towers,
work, communication, performance, shopping, education, masterplans, and the
somewhat anachronistic ‘church and state’. And, in the spirit of stripping
it all back, the disparate list of names, places and projects will be given
an overall shape by John Pawson, the tanned godfather of architectural
Minimalism. Pawson comes to Venice fresh from his first major retrospective,
held at the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern and curated by Sudjic. His
initial design instinct was to provide adequate seating for fatigued
travellers as they journey down the long spaces of Venice’s Arsenale. That
suggestion was apparently rejected, but Pawson does provide a church (from
the Novy Dvur monastery in the Czech Republic) to complete Sudjic’s last
architectural type.
In some respects, this selection and
strategy is obviously that of a journalist. The founding editor of
Blueprint, Sudjic is now editor of the Italian architecture magazine Domus
and architecture critic for The Observer newspaper. What he serves up at
Venice is a not-so sneaky preview of projects that will dominate the pages
of the design press over the coming decade. So, schemes you are going to
hear a lot more about include Future Systems’ department store for
Selfridges in Birmingham, Herzog & de Meuron’s Prada store in Tokyo, David
Adjaye’s Idea Store in London’s Whitechapel, Bernard Tschumi’s Acropolis
Museum in Athens, Norman Foster’s outrageously phallic Swiss Re tower in
London, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa’s transparent Centre for Glass in
Toledo, and – you could have guessed these names were coming (OK, unless you
are British) – Rem Koolhaas’s and Daniel Libeskind’s expansions of the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art and the Denver Art Museum respectively.
Naturally, the other big names – among them Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Jean
Nouvel – will be represented too.
There are also, of course, the national pavilions, which form the other half of the Biennale. Of the 40 nations represented this year the one to go to will probably be that of the British, who, perhaps appropriately, are represented by a Spaniard and an Iranian. Alejandro Zaera Polo and Farshid Moussavi, a husband-and-wife team whose London-based practice is titled Foreign Office Architects, had a dramatic rise to prominence in 1995 when they won a competition to design a new ferry terminal for Yokohama, Japan. The terminal opened in time to greet soccer fans attending this year’s World Cup final, and is a rare mix of complexity, subtlety, tranquillity and beauty that marks the arrival of what will surely be the next big names to emerge from the world of architecture. In any case, two foreigners representing Britain with a project in Japan seems to capture the notion of truly international architecture better than anything else.
Inevitably drawing the crowds as well will be the American Pavilion, where visitors will be given another chance to see the Max Protetch Gallery’s generally disappointing exhibition of hurried design proposals for a new World Trade Center. The City of Towers project, featured in Next, for which ten architects – including Hadid, Future Systems and Ito – have been commissioned to design high-rise skyscrapers, realised as four-metre-high models with the assistance of Alessi, is similar in spirit but will hopefully be better in quality.
Architecture exhibitions tend to be a bit like travel books. They give you a rough description of a site matched to a building, lend it substance with a few details of local colour and ask you to imagine the fabulous (or not so fabulous) structure that will be there. As Sudjic’s curating suggests, the only way to judge them is to go off and see the buildings for yourself. Like Marco Polo’s tales, architecture exhibitions are sometimes misleading, sometimes exaggerated and sometimes plain fantasy. But sometimes they can be remarkably vivid and accurate too.
On the pages that follow, we have selected a few projects and practices, some in the Biennale and some not, which we think are the ones to watch over the next few years. (MR)
The 8th International Architecture Biennale
is in Venice,
8 September – 3 November 2002.
www.labiennaledivenezia.net
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
Kuwait Police Academy, Kuwait City
There’s nothing predictable about the design for the Kuwait Police Academy.
It’s the product of an intriguing collaboration between SOM and artist James
Turrell. Boardroom SOM and sky-gazing Turrell somehow make an unlikely pair,
though Turrell also likes to operate on a grand scale and is no stranger to
the nuances of desert light. In any event, it is probably fair to assume
that light installations and such sophisticated design have never met in a
police training facility. One can understand Kuwaitis wanting to bolster
confidence and security following the Gulf War, and one would expect money
to be no object, but the academy still has an embarrassment-of-riches feel.
It reminds one that inspired architecture can be found in the most
unexpected places.
The thoughtfulness of the design can be seen in the building surfaces, constructed from modules that evoke the Kufic calligraphy of Islamic architecture. Most striking, perhaps, are the light chambers that Turrell designed for the entrances of the dormitory and adminstrative buildings. Turrell, perhaps just for his own edification, has given them names like Sky-Pond, Void-Circle and Big Open; names worthy of a Zen monastery. Away from a vast courtyard, there are other features that inspire pause, including a boardwalk oasis planted with royal palms and a trapezoidal mosque with water pools and oblique light shafts. Will Kuwait become home to the calmest, most enlightened police in the world? Some may never want to graduate. (JM)
dRMM
Kingsdale School, Dulwich, London
Ask most teenagers what they think their school is like and the answer will
be ‘boring’. And the buildings of Kingsdale School are very boring. However,
all this is about to change as the result of a radical makeover by young,
London-based practice dRMM. Championing an architecture of ‘maximalism’
(getting the most out of the least), dRMM – de Rijke, Marsh, Morgan – have
made their name as a result of their unique combination of imaginative
design and materials sourced from standard builders’ catalogues.
At the centre of the Kingsdale scheme is a new courtyard space covered by a bulging roof, the printed skins of which create a moiré effect that allows sunlight to be controlled while producing an ever-changing pixelated pattern as you walk underneath it. It will not, apparently, trigger fits of epilepsy. Beneath the bulge is an auditorium pod designed in collaboration with the gun-manufacturing, alcohol-producing Dutch artist Joep van Lieshout, whose previous architectural projects include the much hyped Rotterdam utopia of AVL-Ville and the much less hyped, but equally dramatic, toilet pod, fastened like some throbbing fibreglass parasite to the same city’s Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum.
Workshops conducted at Kingsdale by dRMM revealed that the pupils’ favoured makeover strategies included total demolition and turning the school into a beach. The final result is a bit of both: selective demolition, the addition of new lightweight structures on top of some of the old and a flexible central oasis in place of the rigid segregation of the old school grid. At the end of it all, school may still be boring, but at Kingsdale it will not be the fault of the environment. (MR)
Shin Egashira
Shirakura Village, Niigata
Shin Egashira was invited to visit the village of Shirakura, Niigata, in
1996, as part of a plan to revitalise marginalised and ageing villages in
the prefecture. He has been back every year since to run a workshop that is
slowly transforming the place through a mixture of temporary and permanent
interventions. Egashira, whose work was first exhibited at the Camden Arts
Centre in 1991, is an unusual architect in that he favours traditional
hand-built structures as a means of exploring the relationship between the
body, the act of making and place. In the past he has explored this in
Beauty of Our Pain, an installation that reconstructs fitness machines in
the form of mediaeval torture devices. In more recent years these ideas have
been further developed through collaborations with artist Tadashi Kawamata
that explore the inhabitation of urban space and the formation of community
in both London and Tokyo.
The villagers of Shirakura have already gained a bus shelter that alters according to the seasons and a pavilion that can be reconfigured and unfolded along tracks to suit changing weather and the requirements of a number of community events. A disused sports hall is now home to After Image,
27 large glass plates on which are printed photographic images taken using a giant, portable (only with the aid of a tractor) pinhole camera, Slow Box, during an 18-day voyage around local villages. In the coming years Slow Box will be redeployed to create an intriguing record of community life. Egashira’s work is uniquely beautiful, fusing art and architecture into an inseparable whole; nowhere can this be better seen than in Shirakura, where his ongoing project takes what is unique about the people and place and enhances it to an even greater degree. House Within a House/House Outside a House, Egashira's collaboration with Tokyo's Spiral Arts Centre, will take place later this year. (MR)
Peter Cook, Colin Fournier
Kunsthaus Graz, Graz
Peter Cook is best known as a member of Archigram, a group of architects
whose futuristic ideas and Pop art style were a poke in the eye of sixties
functionalism. This year, along with the Archigram survivors, Cook was
awarded the RIBA Gold Medal for Architecture, the profession’s most
prestigious award for a lifetime’s achievement. Ironically, Archigram never
built anything. Yet its cartoon-like designs for Walking City (a striding
urban beast) and Instant City were an inspiration to the
hi-tech architects emerging in the seventies and still stand as radical
models of high-density living.
Now a member of the establishment, Cook has not mellowed to the point of towing an establishment line. He describes his design for the Kunsthaus in Graz, Austria, as ‘a friendly alien’. Archigram’s notion of architecture as a mobile organism seems to have been revived in Graz’s new art museum, which will settle among the city’s baroque pitched roofs in time for it to play Cultural Capital of Europe in 2003.
The building is certainly eye-catching, resembling an organ surgically removed from a body, or a pod disconnected from a mothership. Its blue membrane encapsulates two decks of exhibition spaces and culminates in a series of skylight nozzles. Varying in transparency, this skin is embedded with visual data and film sequences, presenting a semi-permeable environment to be absorbed from one of the long travelators circulating through the museum.
One has to ask whether the Kunsthaus really reconciles itself with its surroundings – it is not, after all, as mobile as it looks. Since the main body of the museum sits above ground, there is a sense of continuity at street level, and Cook likes to think that the design echoes the onion-domed churches nearby. Graz is clearly a proud and forward-thinking host. Could the city be anticipating a Bilbao-like surge of interest? (JM)
Klein Dytham architecture
various projects, Japan
If Rem Koolhaas made his mark on the world of architecture by publishing a
book, Klein Dytham may have done the same with their website. At
www.klein-dytham.com you can see their portfolio, look at their favourite
Japanese products, browse a selection of bizarre Japanese canned drinks and
visit Sold Out, which ‘catches Western stars in Japan who would not be seen
dead in their own country pushing products’.
Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein trained in London, leaving for Japan in 1988 on a three-month travel scholarship. Now they are one of Tokyo’s hottest young offices, sharing their ‘Deluxe’ office space with graphic designers, sound designers and a brewery – a combination that has spawned a number of cross-disciplinary cocktails. Last year their Foret department store opened, featuring 6271 white round ‘delineator’ road reflectors attached to a bright green façade. During the day the building sparkles in the sunlight; at night it flashes on and off reflecting the light of surrounding shops and camera flashbulbs.
This April, Klein Dytham’s Gumibath, a freestanding bathroom made of soft blue tiles, each containing a moulded 3-D duck, was on view in a Milan piazza alongside the main Armani store. Inverting the usual perception of bathrooms as hard places (the bath, built from a memory gel used in wheelchair seats and surgical pillows, bulges out when filled with water), the project displays their characteristic blend of style and wit. This is combined with a strong understanding of how to survive in the midst of today’s highly competitive and increasingly blurred visual and brand culture without becoming either overly tacky or plain annoying.
Forthcoming are an interactive space for Bloomberg (late September 2002), a restaurant on top of Jean Nouvel’s Dentsu Tower (December 2002) and a ten-storey ‘designer’ apartment building in Nagoya. (MR)
Diller + Scofidio
Eyebeam, New York City
Until recently Diller + Scofidio was better known for its new media
installations than for its buildings. The husband-and-wife team have been
practicing for over 20 years but completed their first building, a public
housing development in Japan, in 2000. Suddenly their name is on everyone’s
lips. Their Blur Building, now gracing Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland, is a
cloud on stilts. The product of thousands of high-pressure fog nozzles, Blur
is pure spectacle. Its only function is to be beautiful and to suggest that
architecture is more than bricks and mortar.
It is perhaps because Diller + Scofidio are artists as well architects that their Eyebeam design topped a competition that included some of the biggest names in architecture. Eyebeam, planned for 2006, will be New York’s first institution dedicated solely to new media art. The twelve-storey, $60 million centre will undoubtedly shake up the cosy gallery district around it. The design consists of two elegantly snaking ribbons that distinguish the exhibition spaces from the art studios and education facilities. The curved liquid-crystal walls create one seamless exhibition surface that doesn’t privilege the wall over the floor or ceiling. The biggest challenge was to make the design flexible enough to accommodate the rapidly evolving technology. With the white cube behind us, the challenge for artists will be to create work that can live up to the building.
Look out also for Diller + Scofidio’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum, opening in February 2003. (JM)
Pompei A.D.
Total Island, Bermuda
Also worth keeping an eye on is Pompei A.D.’s Total Island project for
Bermuda. Led by Creative Director Ron Pompei, the firm specialises in
producing environments that smoothly deliver one of today’s most pervasive
design concepts: the merging of commerce and culture. In the case of their
design for the Discovery Channel’s Flagship stores this means producing a
product that seeks to ‘educate, entertain and empower people of all ages’.
The words ‘Authentic’, ‘Innovative’, ‘Transformational’, ‘Visceral’ and
‘Connected’ flash on and off on Pompei’s website. Other projects range from
a museum to house one of the largest private collections of Tibetan Buddhist
thangkas in what was formerly Barney’s department store on New York’s
Seventh Avenue (this, in a curious way, seems somehow to sum up the
culture–commerce programme), to store concepts for Urban Outfitters.
Working with a consortium, Pompei aims to transform Bermuda into a ‘world-class destination’ by avoiding Vegas-style artificiality and enhancing the authentic Bermuda experience. Or, as their press release teasingly puts it, ‘think artists-in-residence rather than Club Meds’. Projected start date is 2003. (MR)