The largest rooms contain the most sensuously arrresting exhibits
Below_ Cloudscapes by Tetsuo Kondo Architects and Transsolar
Below_ Architect Christophe Egret challenged 30 participants to capture a pavilion at Venice’s Giardini, armed only with a concertina sketchbook and a pen. The AR collaborated with Nigel Coates on Romania (which modesty prevents us showing); but here are (from top) Robert Sakula’s Holland, Alex Mowat’s Venice, and a mystery hand’s rendering included for its dynamic flair.
Exhibition / The Venice Biennale, 12th International Architecture Exhibition Until 21 November, various venues, Venice, Italy
www.labiennale.org
John Milton is most lauded for the publication of Paradise Lost in 1667, and yet the English poet deserves not a little credit for coining the word ‘sensuous’. As a derivation of the sexually suggestive ‘sensual’, his creation describes being alive to sensations (especially in an aesthetic way) but cleansed of any carnal connotations. Several centuries later, the 2010 architecture biennale in Venice justifies and renews its invention. For although vitally stimulating almost all the senses, after a comprehensive perambulation the only body parts possibly heading towards tumescence are your feet. Curated by Kazuyo Sejima, one half of SANAA, the Japanese
winner of the Pritzker Prize earlier in the year, this is the only time after a dozen iterations that the Biennale has had a female director; after a string of critics and theorists, she is the first architect to lead the exhibition for a decade. Reflecting an astute architectural judgement, Sejima selected 46 diverse participants for the exhibition, which takes place across two sites: in the Arsenale for the principal part, and in the Giardini, at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, alongside the more established national pavilions (see page 92).
The Arsenale’s exhibition is housed in the city’s old rope-works, where the linear arrangement of spaces creates a 300m-long enfilade, grand in scale yet industrial in texture. It is surely no accident that the four largest rooms contain the most sensuously arresting exhibits. The first among these, Transsolar and Tetsuo Kondo Architects, have engineered
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