Biennale Architecture
Out There: Architecture Beyond Building
by Aaron Betsky
To do this, perhaps what we need is slow space –not stopped space, not utopia, but also not business usual. We need some icons and some enigmas to make us wonder. We need experiments, a few provisional structures, a few sketches or some maps of how we can move beyond the constructions and constrictions of building to create an architecture that does not solve problems, but poses, frames and articulates them. We need an architecture that questions reality.
This is the challenge the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale takes up. It seeks to collect and encourage experimentation in architecture. Such experimentation can take the form of momentary constructions, visions of other worlds, or the building blocks of a better world. This Biennale does not want to present buildings that are already in existence and can be enjoyed in real life. It does not want to propose abstract solutions to social problems, but wants to see if architecture, by experimenting in and on the real world, can offer some concrete forms or seductive images.
The use of new technologies is certainly something to consider in such experimentation, but so are the techniques developed outside of what we usually think of as the world of architecture, such as art, interior design, film, landscape architecture and performance. In a concrete sense, the use of collage and assemblage, of re-use and reconstruction, of unbuilding and deformation, of ephemeral form and utopian or dystopian imagery, and the posing of the ugly, the unformed and the undecided or blurred are all possibilities. In reality, there is a secret history of architecture separate from the progression of styles and the vagaries of technological perfection that has used such forces to produce an other architecture, and it is in this tradition that the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale places itself.
Aaron Betsky
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