First shots of the projects presented in the spaces of the Corderie and the Arsenal Artillery, after the Irish curators they have kept the historical architecture intact and legible.
No embellishment, no breaking, no superstructure is capable to “enter in conflict” with the place and with the projects exposed. As preannounced, Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, founders of the studio Grafton Architects and curators of the 16th International Architecture Exhibition, they decided to “observe the quality of the Corderie, of the Artillery and the Central Pavilion”, leaving at “context and the air of Venice” the possibility of entering the tour route.
A willing that manifests itself since the first lines of their exhibition, with a unique perspective sight, to continue one step after another: literally, a meter after another, without any separations and partitions.
To welcome the visitors at the Arsenale it’s a sort of unveiling, an “identikit” of this lagoon exhibition space: two projections, one in front of another, they take the place of the recovered structures from the Biennale 2016 to which Alejandro Aravena had submitted to the incipit of the Reporting from the front.
The Images and the proposed designs evoke the architectural identity of the website and reaffirm its production history; Furthermore, they are prelude to the review of the presented interventions from the international studies selected from the duo, arranged to a disciplined succession.
Below the coverage of wooden trusses, in part illuminated from the projection of the lettering Freespace, runs a double “graphic guide”, which remarks the existing path. In reality it intends to reveal, both in the ancient measure in Veneto feet and in meters, the length of the Arsenal, providing a progressive numeric parameter. Step after step, in fact.
From the Liquid Wall to the "Heroic" regeneration of Corviale
“We have discovered inventiveness and creativity at the micro and macroscopic: historical buildings freed from the intelligence of the architects, buildings forgotten revisited and brought back to life, transformative types of housing, infrastructural needs translated into public and civic structures "
have declared the curators, clarifying the choices made in the composition in the seventy-one participants of the Freespace exhibition.
After an entrusted start of the theme of the design of the school buildings and for the formation of the young generation- a scope to which the study of Grafton Architects he has distinguished himself in forty years of activity with achievements in the whole world-, the visit continues with more examples of recovery and reuse.
From these, the project for the transformation of the convent of Santa Maria do Bouro in hotel, work of Eduardo Souto de Mouta, and the restoration of Sala Beckett, conducted by the studio catalano Flores & Prats Architects of Barcelona. The ethereal interpretation of the theme Freespace proposed by Toyo Ito is opposed “the heroic undertaking” of the Italian study guided by Laura Peretti, who is bringing forward the “liberazione del Gigante” Corviale.
The monumentality of the wooden installation with which the architect and professor Walter Angonese a designer who “deals successfully with small and large projects”, as underlined the curators, here present with the visitor center at the lake Carezza precedes the projection of the video Trees Down Here by a few steps, commissioned by the Anglo-Saxon study 6a architects: un “affiancamento” which seems to lead the public towards a possible reflection on the use of materials in architecture.
More experimental interventions follow one another towards the closing of this first part of Freespace: from the "liquid wall", formed from water and soap, from atelier of Riccardo Blumer another professor and architect, just like Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara- that formed and disappears within a few instants to transparency, to the acrylic spiral of the Japanese Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/ SANAA; from the plots of the vernacular architecture of the Indonesians of the study andramatin till the multi-faceted environment of Dorte Mandrup A/P.
Source: Artribune and La Biennale