According to Aaron Betsky – for six years director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) in Rotterdam, one of the most prestigious museums and architecture centres in the world, and Director of the Cincinnati Art Museum since last year – the 11th Architecture Exhibition turns to architecture beyond building to address the central issues of our society. Instead of buildings, it will present installations made by architects who have responded to the impulse offered by Betsky and accepted his challenge. This challenge reverberates onto us, encourages our capacity for interpretation, and relies on emotion to give us the chance to make sense of the world and feel at home in it. Betsky points out “what should be an obvious fact: architecture is not building. Architecture must go beyond buildings because buildings are not enough. They are big and wasteful accumulations of natural resources that are difficult to adapt to the continually changing conditions of modern life”.
“Most buildings are ugly, useless and wasteful. Yet architecture is beautiful – says Betsky – it can place us in the world in a way no other art can. It can make us at home in modern reality. It offers and shapes that most precious and luxurious of all phenomena in the modern world: space. The exhibition seeks is 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. It 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 11th Architecture Exhibition, Out There: Architecture Beyond Building, will therefore present installations, manifestos and utopian visions in the venues of the Arsenale and the Padiglione Italia at the Giardini. These are experiments developed here to meet the specific goal of the exhibition: to experiment with forms that will renew architecture, the space we live in, our own existence. In the Arsenale visitors will see 23 Installations, and in the Padiglione Italia they will discover the experimental work of 55 international firms and a survey of the Masters of the Experiment.
The Corderie in the Arsenale will open with the presentation of Hall of Fragments, by David Rockwell with Casey Jones + Reed Kroloff: an interactive work that reflects on architecture’s capacity to release its visionary power by borrowing from film imagery. The Corderie will present large-scale Installations, that “are not prototypes for buildings – says Betsky – they are not built affirmations of the purity of form, they are not examples of experiments taking place elsewhere”. They represent different ways of asking questions about architecture and how to feel “at home” in the world. This exhibition raises a challenge that is to be considered within the totality of the works on display, above and beyond the meaning of each individual project. The challenge is to open a dialogue with the audience, not an act of isolation. The architects communicate with the visitors by means of their Manifestos, declarations of intent presented by the authors themselves to involve the visitors in their visions and in their idea of architecture. It aims to establish a common ground and to share a common understanding of things. The participants in the Installations will include : Asymptote, Atelier Bow Wow, Barkow Leibinger Architects, Nigel Coates, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Diller Scofidio+Renfro, Droog Design+Kesselkramer, Vicente Guallart, Frank O. Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Ante Liu, Greg Lynn, M-A-D, Massimiliano Fuksas, MVRDV, Penezić and Rogina, Philippe Rahm, Matthew Ritchie in collaboration with Aranda/Lasch and Daniel Bosia/ARUP AGU, Kramervanderveer, Thonik and UNStudio. The exhibition continues outside the Corderie with a modern-day yurt from Kazakhstan by Totan Kuzembaev, which represents the meeting point between the traditional nomadic civilization and the contemporary one. The visit ends at the Giardino delle Vergini, a new space acquired by La Biennale di Venezia, with Towards Paradise, a landscape installation by Gustafson Porter-Gustafson Guthrie Nichol.
