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American banners
Drew Carling and Jenni Draper report from the US pavilion, which has just opened at the Venice Biennale.
31.08.12 in exhibition
Venice pavilion shortlist yawner
The Australia Council yesterday announced its shortlist for the Venice pavilion competition. As expected, they are playing it safe, with just a couple of smallish practices. Given the level of discontent surrounding the competition, it’s surprising and provocative of them to play it this safe. It’s the competition you have when you’re not having a competition. All blokes who graduated before 1986, so a total lack of Gen X, Y or Z, or XX chromosomes. Of the 67 expressions of interest, the jury of five chose:
24.11.11 in buildings
Comment [8]
Venetian blindness
The Australia Council has just released its request for expressions of interest for the design of the new Australian pavilion in Venice’s Giardini. After much effort by Openhaus, 750 people petitioned the Council to ditch their original limited competition in favour of an open anonymous competition. The Council appeared to relent and adopted a two stage open competition model. This caused further fuss as the first stage, an EOI, was ‘open’ only if you happened to have had experience designing similar buildings overseas. Glenn Murcutt protested that even he would be ineligible.
01.09.11 in expressions-of-interest
Comment [1]
Venice in retrospect
I must apologise. A student from RMIT asked if I would publish this last October and I said, ‘sure!’ and then I somehow forgot. Although it is about a student’s visit to the 2010 Venice Bienalle, which was a while ago now, it is still relevant. It is about a student who goes to Venice to see the architecture, and instead ends up drowning in canapes and crashing parties. Which all leaves him feeling a bit sick.
02.06.11 in events
Venice trekking
Shumi Bose at Urban Omnibus walks us through the exhibits at the Venice Biennale. Despite Seijima’s theme being “People meeting in architecture”, Bose found that, “the consideration of people and experience of architecture was pretty remote from most of the exhibits.” For Shumi, the Romanian pavilion won, with its Bellini-at-the-NGV skewed box in a box.
08.09.10 in exhibition
Now for Now and When
Just a reminder that the Australian exhibition (curated by John Gollings and Ivan Rijavec) at the Venice Architecture Biennale opens on Thursday. From the list of winners, it could be good. I will be keeping an eye open for images from Venice so we can pretend to be there.
24.08.10 in exhibition
Altinum found
Some clever chaps at the University of Padua have mapped the ancient Roman harbour city, Altinum, lying under a paddock seven kms North of Venice. The city had sunk into a lagoon, but some infra-red aerial photography during the 2007 drought was enough to tease it out. Well, after the images were fiddled with to remove plant water stress variations. This article at Der Spiegel has more fascinating images in its photo galleries, including the town’s plan, and some beautiful infra-red aerial photos of crops and cities.
01.08.09 in cities photographers
Venetian Ouch
Occasional forum participant, Hairdresser, thinks Dulux made the only architectural contribution to the bright yellow Australian pavilion at the Architecture Biennale in Venice. S/he points us to Elizabeth Farrelly’s review in the SMH . She attended the glittering opening with a “litigation” of architects, and bumped into Jeffrey Kipnis, who suggested that the Australians need to, “drop the naïve act.” Whereas other pavilions have an angle, something to say about architecture’s role in the state and fate of things, the RAIA-funded pavilion is less controversial. Farrelly quotes RAIA president Howard Tanner as saying that, “the Biennale is about the need to publicise.”
Comment [2]
