Venice – Peter Raisbeck: surviving the design studio

#Freespace: The 16th Venice Architecture Biennale

July 16, 2018July 17, 2018Peter Raisbeck

For regular readers of this blog, I am sorry for going AWOL for a few weeks. This is the biggest break from my weekly blogging that I have had since I started this endeavour. Of course, I feel a little guilty. But hey, this blog is not always about the Google stats, if it ever was. For the past few weeks, I have been in Italy and managed to visit the Architecture Biennale. So, dear blog reader the next few blogs will focus on the 2018 Biennale. So dear readers, you can now say, as they say in the Chucky Movie he’s back. Typos and all.

Freespace

Freespace is the theme for the 2018 Architecture Biennale, and it has been curated by two Irish architects, Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara. It is thought-provoking and well curated, and this is the best Biennale I have seen. They have done a great job. And for the most jaded of architectural hacks such as myself, looking at it through a haze of Cocchi Americano spritz, the curators have presented their theme as a comprehensive vision (Aperol is no longer my drink of choice on the lagoon). Its a vision of what architecture can aspire to be. Compared to past Biennale’s, it is not as muddled as Chipperfield’s theme of “Common Ground” or as ambiguous as Sejima’s “People Meet in Architecture” of 2010. This Biennale, unlike previous versions, has its very own manifesto written around the notion of Freespace.

The Manifesto

Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara are graduates of University College Dublin and their practice is called Grafton architects . The Freespace manifesto has six points. You can read the entire manifesto here. Here are a two manifesto points for your edification.

FREESPACE can be a space for opportunity, a democratic space, un-programmed and free for uses not yet conceived. There is an exchange between people and buildings that happens, even if not intended or designed, so buildings themselves find ways of sharing and engaging with people over time, long after the architect has left the scene. Architecture has an active as well as a passive life.

FREESPACE encompasses freedom to imagine, the free space of time and memory, binding past, present and future together, building on inherited cultural layers, weaving the archaic with the contemporary.

You can see all the selected architects here

These are noble aspirations, and the manifesto helps to keep everything together. I think that Farrell and McNamara have curated a Biennale that is in keeping with their manifesto. Of course, the theme must allow enough room for broad interpretation and yet lend itself to specificity. Farrell and McNamara, and the architects, have done this admirably, and one of the great joys of this Biennale is the effort that has gone into the interpretive signage of each of the 71 or exhibitors in the Venice Giardini and the Corderie within the Venetian Arsenale; the impregnable complex of shipyards that was the epicentre of the Venetian Republic’s power. For each exhibitor, Farrell and McNamara provide for the visitor a piece as to why each was chosen and how their work relates to the overall theme. These little blurbs are concise, well written, refer back to the Freespace manifesto and are a pleasure to read.

Frampton

And it might seem foolhardy to find a stable point in the plethora of approaches selected and presented at this Biennale. Nevertheless, this Biennale evokes Frampton’s 1983 essay, Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance. In it Frampton argued that optimising technologies had delimited the ability of architects to produce significant urban form.⁠ The curators, like Frampton, strenuously advocate for the legitimacy of localised architectural cultures and a discourse resistant to processes of universalisation. The work of Critical Regionalism itself was to, “mediate the impact of universal civilisation with elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular place.⁠” Much of what the curators have selected in this Biennale accord with this sentiment. So much so they awarded Frampton a Golden Lion.

A Computer #FreeSpace Zone

Best of all this is a Biennale that is very much a computer free zone. Yep. Let me just say that again. This is a biennale that is very much a computer free zone. Yes, there are lots of exquisite laser-cut models, there are obviously computer-generated drawings and diagrams. But for many of these architects, their patrons, and ordinary punters this is an exhibition that is about a kind of bottom up-architecture. There is no bombast or hyperbole related to the latest computer technologies to solve all of our problems. By and large, most exhibitors have provided representations of their own work, rather than pursuing dreary conceptual pieces based on abstract ideas. One might ask Farrell and McNamara, if they think computer hyperbole is diametrically opposed to the aspirations of Freespace?

Of course, between these two polarities–the curator’s against a universal society and the absence of in your face computing–there are other pathologies at play that probably cannot be covered in a blog like this.

A schlock free zone

This is a Biennale refreshingly free of abstract schlocky volumes, cheap Eisenman-like syntactics and thankfully para-mucking-metrics. A few installations are overly conceptual, and they fall pretty flat. There is only so much you can do with gauze curtains and multi-media. This is a biennale depicting an architecture still based in the techniques of drawing, model making, section (remember those) and the plan. Yes, the plan, the plan as a working method, before it became an overly coagulated El Lissizky composition; drawn over and over and over again with line sequences adjusted a little bit here and there; lines never expressive enough to break out of the constraints of fluid capital.

This is a Biennale exhibition of models, materiality, construction and spatial context. An architecture cognisant of regional differences, cultural layers and as the curators say in their manifesto.

FREESPACE encompasses freedom to imagine, the free space of time and memory, binding past, present and future together, building on inherited cultural layers, weaving the archaic with the contemporary.

Highlights

This is very much a Biennale that exhibit’s work that is shaped by propositions and experiments of the European city. The stats tend to suggest this: 46 of the firms represented are from Europe, 11 from across Asia, 5 from South America. Peter Rich from South Africa. Notably, the Trumpian republic only has 5. In theory, this Eurocentric focus and pursuit of Frampton’s credo is paradoxically the limitation of this Biennale. In accord with the Freespace manifesto, much of the work of the firms in the Arsenale is focused on exploring layers, community, culture, memory and the morphologies of the European city. Yes, the curators have selected some non-European entries from India, China and South Americas. But overall, the wan light of the iniquitous slum-cities now sprawling across the globe are missing at this Biennale. This is arguably an architecture formed in a Eurocentric bubble, and one wonders if Freespace is radical or confrontational enough to fill the gap. Perhaps in the future, some historians will decide that Betsky’s 2008 Biennale was the last gasp of American architecture.

Nonetheless, the result is refreshing as this is by and large it’s a star architect, and parametric free zone, although beautiful, charming and talkative Bjarke is there with a dreary flooded scheme of New York replete, in a room with plasma screens which have a cheesy blue bubble water that rising up on each screen. It reminded me of the Bubblecup franchise (I guess that’s what happens when you leave Europe and go to New York). Nothing like converting global warming and rising sea levels, to a graphics device on a plasma screen to help avert the actual horrors of climate justice.

Ozzie, Ozzie, Ozzie

And of course what about the Ozzie’s? What about the Ozzie, Ozzie, Ozzie, Oi, Oi, Oi architects. Well, there are two plucky little Australian firms selected by the curators in the Asrsenale. John Wardle and Room 11. Wardle makes it into the Arsenale with a giant kind of conceptual spotted gum (if that was the species) piece, sadly let down by an overwrought plastic red thing with a mirror at the end. I can’t even begin to tell you what it reminds me of. It would have been better to see some of the practice’s work. As for Room 11, from Tasmania, I think I have written about them elsewhere.

Caccia Dominioni

One of the revelations for me was the presentation of the work of the late Milanese architect Caccia Dominioni curated by Cino Zucchi. Dominioni worked to create magnificent apartments for the Milanese bourgeois.

When I see this work I think it indicates a rigorous working method committed to a project that inscribes the lives and habits of a people into the plan. His work is a far cry from the Jim Jims and melamine soaked interiors, featurist luxuries, and cheap scrims in the apartment plans of Australian cities.

In coming weeks I will discuss the Sean Godsell’s contribution at the Holy See, Repair the Australian Pavilion and maybe even the MADA wall. In the meantime don’t forget to help Architeam fund the RASP project.

What makes a great architecture school? Why its time to dismantle the pedigrees.

March 24, 2017Peter Raisbeck

So what makes a good architecture school? Everyone seems to have an opinion about it. It’s a complex area. Some architects wonder why the graduates of architecture schools are not technically skilled or seem totally useless. A largely baseless and crude accusation that contributes nothing tot he debate. Any attempt to either consult or change the curricula with the professional bodies outside of university is fraught with petty politics. Architectural academics (and most have a foot in the real world) are totally constrained by a wider regulatory regime that both hampers their ability to create knowledge and then does not fully account for that knowledge when it is created.

My life as an architecture student.

There is still no research infrastructure to count, yes actually count for, for architectural designs and projects produced in and alongside the academy. This is scandalous and something that the wider profession needs to address. Every time I collaborate on a project or a competition it is not counted in university research metrics. In contrast it me took me ten years (more by the time I graduated) do my architecture degree. This was a combination part-time work, a year working in a sheet metal factory, self-education through reading, feeling the need to prepare for 6 months before I did the next studio and hanging out with my employer the Master smoking cigarettes. When I wasn’t driving the Mater’s car on errands (or stacking it) we often talked, yes actually talked, about architecture. Thanks to the Whitlam program I was the first in my family to go the university.

Students are forced to pay exorbitant fees and as a result just want to get in and get out. Now more dawdling. No more leisurely processes of self-education. No more long chats about architecture and life, the universe and everything. , any attempt to educate students more deeply beyond the contents of packaged up, templated and accreditated university courses and subject’s is fraught. It’s really different now and some would argue this new environment has corroded our public life.

The contrasting idea is that architecture itself is a comprehensible system, and architecture schools embody a system of education that both shapes and supports the canons and norms of the discipline. It’s the Bauhaus (being a prime example of a systematised education) idea of architectural education.

Venice

I have always suspected that a few people around my provincial town (secretly I am one of them as well) are enamoured with the IAUV and the so-called Venice School of architecture. A school that was presided over by the provincial “barbarian” Guiseppe Samona. Think a melange of Rossi’s types and Giorgio Grassi’s realism and Gregotti, a deft nod to the theorist Cacciari & historian Tafuri, and the urban realism of Aymonino. For a Melbourne suburban boy Italian architecture is all pretty intoxicating.

Parametricism 2.0

Of course, schools can be seen to be evil. As recently as last year Schoomee (Patrik Schumacher) was pretty pissed writing that:

This turn away from Parametricism is most conspicuous within the former hotbeds of the movement such as the Architectural Association (AA) in London and Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) in New York. Another indication is the general backlash against ‘iconic’ architecture in architectural criticism, and the recent proliferation of a frugal Neo-Rationalism. The anti-icon polemic misunderstands that an architecture that is rigorously developed on the basis of radically new, innovative principles becomes conspicuous by default rather than by intention. Both the anti-icon and NeoRationalist camps fail to recognise that the new societal complexity calls for urban and architectural complexity.

I love reading the stuff Schumaker (spelling?) writes its so kerazy and the above quote pretty much says it all and points to the grip that the “pedigreed” and branded schools have on our disciplines. Schools, whose graduates are them hoovered into the intern machines of the star architects Like his own. Perhaps, Schoomey should start his own Schumaccher school.

There are a few glimmers of hope around the place. On the West Coast. The Free Architecture School is being set up by Peter Zellner and it appears to contest the prevailing and pedigreed paradigms of what architecture schools should be like.”

“Many schools of architecture […] now find themselves mired in various forms of academic cult worship: digital traditionalisms, faux-art fetishisms, silly mannerist dead-ends, philosopher-shaman worship, and other neoconservative returns.”

“Several generations of students were robbed of their voices and their right to grow potent individual practices,”

Zellner argued that a post-studio model of architectural teaching, one which is founded on open conversation, student autonomy and critique, “now seems imperative and necessary” to unshackle students and teachers alike from the master–disciple model of teaching..

Peter Zellner is right. A really great architecture school would be self governing: students would be involved in its processes of decision making and production, it would have no pedigree except for what it night produce at a particular moment in time. It would experiment across the territories that only diversity can engender. It would generate open conversations and ideas that would be debated in civil society. It would be a system that would produce new ideas for the discipline rather than imposing pedagogical strictures or reinforcing pedigrees.

In some ways all of these elements were present, to an extent, at the architecture school I attended. As well as the one I am now at. But we need more than just elements; we need radically different modes of teaching and learning in architecture. To say the least, the neoliberal turn in higher education policy has not really helped architecture. A great architecture school is a crucible for all of the wild and crazy ways of architects and architecture.

Venice Architecture Biennale 2018: In search of Australian Architecture’s global brand.

February 24, 2017February 24, 2017Peter Raisbeck

Today is almost the day that the call for the creative director of the Australian Architecture pavilion at the 2018 Venice Biennale closes. At least we now have a relatively decent exhibition gallery in the Giardini to exhibit in. The old pavilion, as we all know, was designed by Philip Cox (kind of channelling Glen Murcutt) and it looked like a little bit of that old timey Darling Harbour style. The pavilion contained a series of long spaces, over two levels, with vaulted metal deck roofing. The new affair by the Melbourne architects DCM is much better as an exhibition space and I visited it in 2015 and saw how it worked for Fiona Hall’s exhibition for the Art Biennale. Of course it is pity that this commission was not a public competition. This was the source of some controversy at the time. But, that is not to deny the fact that DCM have done well; It would have been a nightmare project to have managed, constructed and delivered.

The architecture Biennale at Venice is the shining and glittering highlight in the calendar of the global system that is architecture these days. From my antipodean perspective, it probably ranks almost as highly as the AA Projects Review exhibition or the opening of the Serpentine Pavilion. It’s as if a Klingon ship, has picked up quaint little earth in a tractor beam, given it a shake and all the world’s architectural models has fallen of their storage shelves and lodged in Venice. Venice that city of cities where all the other cities of the world and their histories, can be glimpsed in Venice’s own layers and edges around the lagoon. Venice has always been a place of politics, intrigue and controversy: Just like the Architecture Biennale itself in terms of who is being selected ect. It has always been a place where the flows of territorial ambition and power collided and then just as quickly departed. Of course these days, Venice is more like Disneyland in some ways where every tow years the architectural glitterati drink Aperol’s on the Grand Canal and in eat Fiaschetteria Toscana.

All of this exoticism and history and the fact that the worlds biggest architectural trade show is in Venice every two years might be why over time Australian architects have generally gone nuts over the Venice Biennale. There is nothing like swanning around the Vernissage (the opening week of the Biennale) and going to the parties. When I went it was like being in Prahran. Of course, as I discovered you have to know the right sort of people to get invited to the parties with Rem, Sejima or Patrik (Patrick?) or Zaha (god rest her soul). The only party I ever managed to stumble into was one held by the Armenians, in a stripped out Palazzo hulk somewhere behind Campo Santa Margherita, who despite their long association with the Venetian lagoon had run out of beer and Aperol’s by the time I stumbled into the party. At least the Armenians knew how to dance. So going to Venice as an invited exhibitor, and more so as a so-called creative director, is a prestigious gig; if you don’t get invited to exhibit in the gardens or the Arsenale you can always set something up in one of the numerous Palazzo’s around the town and make it look or seem half decent. All you need is a couple of plasma screens and a bit of money to print a catalogue.

Just the name Venice or Architecture Biennale is enough to make most architects swoon. Which is literally what happened to me as my friends will know at the 2010 Biennale. I drank so much Aperol that I leached all the Potassium out of my system and ended up in the Venice Ospedale (sadly, as all architects know, not the one that Corb wanted to build). My room overlooked the lagoon towards San Michele the cemetery island. For a day I was able to reflect and think about one the great architectural projects of the last century. Aldo Rossi’s Floating Theatre constructed for the 1979-80 Venice Biennale. As I thought I was going to die from a Aperol Spritz induced coma Rossi. I thought about what Rossi had said about his theatre in Venice.

“and what better place for a beacon, a house of light, literally a lighthouse, than by the sea, in a border zone between sea and land, amid beach, rock, sky and clouds?”

Any way I lived to tell the tale about being in the Ospedale. I certainly saved a few bucks because Venice is no place for the small practitioner on a limited travel budget.

I have been to quite a few of Biennale’s and the Australian representation at them is to some degree problematic. I can’t remember if I have said this in a previous blog or not: But, what exactly is Australia’s brand in the global system of architecture? As I touched on last week with the hair thing in this world of Google analytics and SEO’s its amazing that a Google search of Australian architecture reveals mostly Murcutt, Utzon (not really Australian) and maybe a bit of Harry Seidler. I fear there is a lot of Opera House and Murcutt action when people think of Australian Architecture. Even the Wikipedia entry is execrable. Whoever wrote the second sentence of that entry should at the very least be transported back in time to be reeducated in a Maoist collective.

The problematic nature, or lack of a brand or even an identity, around Australia’s global Architectural brand can be seen to some degree in the various curated Biennale that have occurred over the past dozen years or so. My quick take, and Raisbeck ratings on each one is below.

2006: Micro Macro City Creative Directors Shane Murray and Nigel Bertram.

I thought this was characteristically dry and lacking in any kind of ironic reflection. But in hindsight I think it did depict a kind of realist picture of Australian cities and suburbs. The Models in the exhibition were great. (Raisbeck Rating 8/10)

2008. ABUNDANT Creative Directors Neil Durbach, Vince Frost, Wendy Lewin, Kerstin Thompson and Gary Warner.

After the tight and well planned 2006 gig this was the complete opposite. It’s almost as if the creative directors had to purge the building of the tone of the Micro Macro City exhibition. This as a real free for all it was like every boy and is dog (except of course Raisbeck) got a gig in it. Annoyingly, the catalogue, if it existed at all, was non-existent by the time I got there. It contained hundreds (140 to be exact) of models all vying to be different. Some of these were really good and some were really bad. The spin around it was that it was a way of establishing the scope and range of Australian Architectural experiment. Sadly, I think it lacked a firm theoretical basis and just made us look like a nation of idiosyncratic and isolated savants. Having said that it was indeed an exuberant and “abundant” celebration of the pluralism of Australian Architecture and I liked the way the Cox Pavilion was painted green. (Raisbeck Rating 6.5-7/10)

2010: NOW and WHEN Creative Directors John Gollings and Ivan Rijavec.

This was the one I was involved with a collaborative collective that we called ourselves colony collective. Basically, two crappy laptops and a lot of help from Flood Slicer who set up the multimedia works in the exhibition. This was a take on Australia cities in 2050. Our entry Mould City was intended to be a kind of Superstudio or Archizoom take on Australia’s future cities.

Mould City Colony Collective 2010

Disappointingly, in the other architectural ruminations, there were a lot of flooded cities. And I mean a lot of flooded cities. Plus, a few overhead floating type cities. Readers of this blog will probably you know the sequence: One, climate change is real. Two, the icecaps will melt. Three, the cities will flood. Four, lets build floating cities etc etc. Theory and l discourse around Utopian architecture is really lacking in Australia. Nonetheless, Golling’s images of the mines were great and ALL the technology worked. (Raisbeck Rating 7.5-8/10)

2012: Formations Creative Directors Anthony Burke, Gerard Reinmuth, with TOKO concept design

This was the worst one I ever saw it was disjointed and paltry. A total waste of money and resources.The Creative Directors selected six architectural teams working in non-traditional ways and domains from around the nation for the exhibition. The intention was to highlight different modes of practice. In part it did this, but not convincingly. When I got there I couldn’t quite figure out what it was about. It looked scrappy, and as if the creative directors were more interested in being creative directors than actually working to put together a credible exhibition representing, the 6 teams, Australian Architecture. Google it and all you get is pictures of the creative directors in linen jackets and black t-shirts or shirts. I did not really get the football tables outside of the exhibition. (Raisbeck 4/10)

2014: Augmented Australia: 1914 – 2014 Creative Directors felix._Giles_Anderson+Goad

This one was on when the new pavilion was being constructed. I didn’t really get to visit this one so there is not a lot I can say. There was a call for unbuilt and then augmented projects and I submitted a few but of course; but not being a so-called star architect and given our practice is consigned to the graveyard of small practice oblivion its understandable that any one would want to remodel or Augment on of our old projects. There was a whole lot of kiosky-appy-cloudy Ipad action; I am told the technology didn’t quite work on the day (but perhaps I am wrong). I thought it was probably a good idea. (Raisbeck rating 7/10). The project below is the one of ours (Raisbeck and Klempfner circa 1995) that they decided not to “augment.” It certainly could have done with that.

Hanoi Office Building Raisbeck and Klempfner 1995

2016: The Pool Creative Directors Amelia Holliday, Isabelle Toland (Aileen Sage) and Michelle Tabet

This was the first one in the new building. I wasn’t sure about this one. I thought maybe it was more of a social history rather than an architectural history. I was also worried that the curators may have forgotten the fact that the public swimming pool has been a colonising instrument space for subjugating Australia along racial and gender lines. I think they perhaps managed to avoid that trap. But I am not sure that the social history of the pool says that much about our architectural culture. (Raisbeck rating 7/10)

Given the above, and my ratings aside. I would argue that a strongly theorised and polemical exhibit is better than some of the above efforts. I know of few friends who have tried to do this.Only to be knocked back by an overly conservative AIA selection committee. I suspect that is a better than trying to appease everyone or going for concepts that are so saccharine that they really do not add to Australia’s global architectural brand; I mean what si that brand anyway; we really need to shift the brand away from the Utzon-Murcutt-quaint-Boyd and Seidler brand attributes and make our own the contribution to debates and experiments now emerging in the global system that is architecture. I have not really discussed that much about the overall curation of the Biennale. I will leave that for a later blog.

Maybe for the AIA it’s all about getting the sponsorship dollars. That is fair enough to some extent. Janet Holmes a Court has done a great job in that regard. Some countries have the gumption to only exhibit the work of one architect or architectural firm. Other’s tackle ideas that are in themselves controversial. Presenting a seamless and saccharine image, or an overly pluralist one, of what Australian architecture is like doesn’t really cut it for me. With any luck we might even start to dismantle the innately conservative nexus of Star Architecture, parametricism and Ivy League privilege that bedevils global architecture. On paper at least this year’s curators for the entire Biennale look like they might be able to do that.

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