(Slovenčina) Recenzia / BENÁTSKE BIENÁLE ARCHITEKTÚRY 2021

This year's exceptional and postponed from last year Venice Architecture Biennale is a very good Biennale!

Finally, after the minimalist solo exhibitions and modernist Japanese-British-Dutch-Chilean and Irish reminiscences after 2008 (Sejima 2010, Chieperfield 2012, Koolhaas 2014, Aravena 2016 and Grafton Architects 2018), the current seventeenth pandemic architecture biennale is once again a look at the problems of today’s world. Hashim Sarkis is an American-Lebanese curator, Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT, and his theme, which he came up with before the pandemic, How will we live together? truly reflects the contemporary world, and the well thought out and constructed thesis has become largely prophetic.

Since its expansion into a separate regular architectural exhibition with Paolo Portoghesi’s historically significant post-modern manifestation exhibition The Presence of the Past with Strada-Novissima in the spaces first discovered by the architects for the Biennale at the Arsenale in 1980, the Biennale has always determined the present and future of architectural direction, curators after Portoghesi such as Aldo Rossi 1985 and 1986, Francesco Dal Co 1991, Hollein 1996, Fuksas 2000, Sudjic 2002, W. Forster 2004, Burdett 2006, and Betsky 2018 were even more progressive pioneers of new themes. The Biennale found in Hashim Sarkis a thinker who, by bringing the academic abstract Western European and especially American discourse back into the realm of critical thinking, returned the Biennial’s platform to the realm of critical thought. Sarkis’s concept presents a geopolitical map of the world that connects diverse realities in terms of perspectives on politics, economics and society through architects and artists who connect in Venice from a global multitude of radically different places. Sarkis’ architecture is undoubtedly a discipline that is able to directly cross the boundaries on this map, revealing its criticality and grasping its positive aspects.

It was difficult to predict whether this year’s postponed exhibition would finally be realised and whether the architectural community would still meet in Venice, and whether there was still a possibility of realising a similarly demanding event in the context of modern organisational and logistical complications. Just as the just-ended, postponed and visitorless Tokyo Olympics demonstrated the continuation of a stalled life, so the Venice Biennale, which runs until November, manifests the continuing life of the profession. The road to the preview Biennale this year was uncertain and perilous until the last moment. Arrangements for travel, accommodation and covid tests were as uncertain as the expectations of what to see, who to meet and, generally, what to experience. An empty airport and an emptied St Mark’s Square, devoid of tourists and with the uncompromisingly put-on guises of young and old local Venetians alike, were no harbinger that the exhibitions in both the Giardini and the Arsenale and in the national pavilions would be filled with a multitude of installations, projects and initiatives. Architects have brought life and new challenges to a seemingly dying lagoon, renowned for its tradition of the sea.

Biennale Architettura 2021 is motivated by the new kinds of challenges the world is posing to architecture, but it is also inspired by the emerging activism of young architects and the radical revisions proposed by the profession of architecture to take up these challenges. Architects are by nature “conveners”. They synthesize between different fields and coordinate between different professionals and represent them in front of the client. They are contract administrators. But beyond that, architects design possible social organizations by way of sequencing and linking spaces. They also shape the memorials, memories and expressions of societies and groups and create a common language that allows the public to debate and communicate their experiences and cultures.

In the Arsenale and the Central Pavilion in the Giardini Sarkis invited different authors and mixed teams who, with speculative complex installations, respond to the themes of diverse being, new households, emerging communities, overcoming borders and living as if on the same planet. Slovakian designer living in the Netherlands Tomáš Libertíny presented the bee-generated architecture Beehive Architecture, MAEID Buro fur architektur und transmediale kunst built a staged landscape constructed by a robotic arm, London-based ecoLogicStudio Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletta, with whom the Slovakian Tereza Grešková collaborates, presented a collective experiment of biotechnological architecture developed at the Morphogenesis Lab Bartlett, School of Design and LAB University in Innsbruck. Achim Menges ICD Stuttgart and Jan Knippers ITKE Stuttgart installed material culture – a robotic construction technology developed from carbon fibre as a rethinking of the physical substrate for shared living – a cluster of exceptional scientific and technological collaboration between ICD and ITKE Institute of Computational Design, University of Stuttgart. Daniel López Pérez, Reiser-Umemoto, Princeton School of Architecture reinstalled the pneumatic object Geoscope 2: Worlds developed for the 125th anniversary of R. Buckminster Fuller and the publication R. Buckminster Fuller, Pattern – Thinking (Lars Müller Publishers, 2020).

In the installation in the Central Pavilion, designed by artist Tomás Saraceno in collaboration with MIT meteorologists, visitors can enter an inflatable sculpture that rises into the air without the use of fossil fuels. Called Museo Aero Solar Reconquista and created in Buenos Aires, the work is one of dozens around the world created by communities that are “rescuing” their own balloons using plastic bags. Represented by its founders, artist Olafur Eliasson and architect Sebastian Behmann, Studio Other Spaces (SOS), Future Essembly traces a living collection of people’s attempts to recognise and secure natural rights over the 75-year history of the UN Charter. Architects Pierre Alain Trévelo and Antoine Viger-Kohler, who founded the Paris-based firm TVK, have created a fictional planet that explores and documents the effects of infrastructure on geography. The transformations that are created on the ground are registered in the dimensions of the geological layers.

Sometimes the content gets back to the installation itself. In an exhibition at the Spanish Pavilion called Uncertainty, four curators created a cloud project consisting of pieces of paper generated from different architectural projects. The aim of the installation was to act as an archive of strategies for our life together – an inexhaustible source of uncertainties. Curated by architect Dirk Somers of Bovenbouw Architectuur, the Belgian pavilion is filled with a fictional, albeit “recognizable” city that asks, “How can the city and architecture flourish together?” It’s an increasingly urgent question: Preservationists, urban planners, developers, and city governments are struggling to create enough housing, green space, and transportation for the urban centers of the world. Somers proposes a combination of adaptive reuse and new construction that organizers say “contribute to a cobbled but balanced city.” The American Pavilion, co-designed by Paul Preissner and Paul Andersen, both professors at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is titled American Framing and explores the use of timber framing in American architecture, bringing the entire exhibition closer to this building technology to a much-forgotten foundation of American architecture and an ignored form of construction.

The British pavilion garden Privatised Delights, designed by Manijeh Verghese and Madeleine Kessler, highlights the growing barriers between the UK’s public and private spaces. Visitors are guided through a series of imaginative installations that are a credit to a primarily intellectual exercise: the exhibition calls for new models of private public space in cities across the UK. It questions the polarisation of the private and public sectors that often leads to divisions in society. Many of the pavilions take the question posed by the Biennale organisers literally. The installation of the Nordic Pavilion, by the National Museum of Norway, was designed by the architectural firm Helen & Hard. It is a prototype of communal living in which many services are shared. The pavilion is divided into several sections, some with shared working and eating areas and private and semi-private rooms for sleeping, relaxing and playing.

The Czechoslovak pavilion was closed and empty for the first time in the history of the Venice exhibitions. Both Slovakia and the Czech Republic disappeared from catalogues and information brochures and ceased to exist in the world of the Venice Architecture Biennale in the current groundbreaking history of 2020 and 2021. The damaged building from the spring of 2020, the subsequent pandemic crisis and stoppage of life, the bureaucracy and slowness of the National Gallery in Prague and the curatorial inactivity of the Slovak National Gallery, in contrast to all the other countries in the world that took the opportunity to present themselves in Venice, confirmed the alarming cultural situation of both Slovak and Czech society. Several countries such as Germany, Australia or Canada have adapted their presentations to the uncertainty of today’s physical installation, either by posting links on websites or through the virtual reality of scanning images of QR codes with smartphones.The Czechoslovak pavilion was closed and empty for the first time in the history of the Venice exhibitions. Both Slovakia and the Czech Republic disappeared from catalogues and information brochures and ceased to exist in the world of the Venice Architecture Biennale in the current groundbreaking history of 2020 and 2021. The damaged building from the spring of 2020, the subsequent pandemic crisis and stoppage of life, the bureaucracy and slowness of the National Gallery in Prague and the curatorial inactivity of the Slovak National Gallery, in contrast to all the other countries in the world that took the opportunity to present themselves in Venice, confirmed the alarming cultural situation of both Slovak and Czech society. Several countries such as Germany, Australia or Canada have adapted their presentations to the uncertainty of today’s physical installation, either by posting links on websites or through the virtual reality of scanning images of QR codes with smartphones.

With the presentation of revolutionary “tablets” and the activities of young and emerging art and civic associations, nine years ago (2012) Slovakia was among the technological and conceptual innovators when, despite a traditionally incomparable financial budget and the misunderstanding of local architectural criticism, the concept of presenting and exhibiting architecture was completely overturned, and Pernecký’s technologized and digitized presentation of architecture and urban activism put cracks in the previously conservative concept of physically exhibiting architecture. Jan Pernecký’s project foresaw the future, and his form of digital reading has now become a reality in Venice.