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Esposizioni

Exhibiting architecture, another missed opportunity

Pietro Valle



Through the exhibition, appearance as a phenomenon builds a real territory for itself, it takes the floor to presume or affirm that every concrete emission is already concluded.
Germano Celant, A visual Machine, 1982




 
[in italiano] Architecture is an alienated discipline, continually seeking otherness and something that lies outside it. The designer does not him/herself make the object: rather he/she must produce scores that will be followed by others. In its attempt to communicate with various others (clients, administrators, builders, consultants, inhabitants, the public) architecture adopts many different languages, coming into relation with the various fields of knowledge that enter into its sphere of action, such as economics, statics, art and politics. Communication systems change over time, and architecture must keep abreast of them: thus experimenting with new codes is part of its very nature. In a sense it is condemned to an on-going search to perfect relations, a process which however is highly elusive because it never lies within a definitive system.

When a public exhibition, such as the recent Venice Biennial, declares that architecture may be referred to a single product, and that this product uses its own codes that must never be mixed with other forms of communication, it rejects the complexity of the project, its nature as an open-ended process. The Venice exhibition has not even got the courage to define the autonomy of architecture (as has been done in other exhibitions in the past). On the contrary, it isolates some icons to be celebrated, bringing the usages of mass communication into the discipline so as to dismember it with its own weapons. Architecture celebrates itself with the tools it claims to reject; this is perhaps the most evident contradiction that immediately catches the eye on a first visit to the Giardini, but above all to the Arsenale: the construction of a caricature of architectural identity. Traces of this process are also visible in the choices that have been made concerning the presentation of the exhibition.


An exhibition is a form of communication that constructs models so as to define how a work should be interpreted. These models are not limited to the theoretical sphere, but become the real environment, defining physical relationships between observer, object, support and space, as well as establishing an interval between the different objects, thus ordering the exhibition sequence. While the spatialisation of communication is a defining characteristic of exhibitions, they also have to do with changing the environment and thus with architecture. When architecture decides to "exhibit itself" a curious split occurs in which architecture is both message and display at one and the same time. What response should we give to this simultaneous presence? How can we exploit the potential surplus? There are three principal approaches.

a) The first and most cautious approach selects one part of architecture's communication process (usually visual representation) which becomes the object on show, on a par with the other items in the exhibition. In so doing architecture becomes fragmented, losing all capability to relate different languages. One part of it is isolated and reduced to a passive object that can easily be understood, to be exhibited like a product on the market. The symbiosis between architecture-object and architecture-presentation is rejected, and the two are radically separated. In any case the object imposes its requirements on the environment, and the environment acts as a neutral background, a tool at the service of improving concentration on the object exhibited.

b) A second approach brings into play a multi-sensorial device in which it is the environment itself that creates communication. The dichotomy between object and presentation is rejected and the latter prevails, becoming an installation, a form of scenography or a model building, in which communication techniques from other disciplines are experimented (graphics, video, theatre, etc.). In this exploration, the boundaries of architecture become uncertain, but undoubtedly architecture brings physical space into relation with the new non-material forms of communication. The problem at most becomes one of choice: what possibilities are left to the public, and what is imposed by the architect-director? This question has not yet been resolved and many multimedia exhibitions are reduced to orchestrated performances in which freedom of interpretation is sacrificed to the show.

c) There is a third way of relating architecture in with that of the exhibition, and it is the way that does not sacrifice either of these for the other, but prefers the difficult balancing act of keeping both of them in play. Reciprocal influences and exchanges of role are pointed up, but also the unbridgeable distance that separates space and communication. It is attempted to communicate the complexity of architecture without directly stating it, rather allowing it to emerge in the difference that it provokes. There is no certain way of achieving this, but when it does happen, in particular exhibitive situations, a short circuit is created that goes beyond the sum of the parts. A play comes about between real architecture and represented architecture in which each is projected onto the other, taking on different meanings linked to the particular recontextualisation provided by the occasion of the exhibition. The existing architecture is modified by the represented architecture; the projects that are exhibited define a spatial situation while keeping their condition clearly separated from the constructed part. These dialectic exchanges invite us to think, to explore and (possibly) succeed in resisting the immediate consumption of prepackaged images promoted by mass communication.

The first approach was taken by Sudjic in the latest Architecture Biennial. The traditional representations of drawings and relief models are isolated and become finished objects, closed within themselves. No matter whether they are related to the building that they will constitute, they only have value as icons. They are sufficient to describe an architecture with an abbreviated formula for mass consumption. The pieces of facade in full scale are separated from the buildings and, since a comparison of scale with the spaces is not possible, they too become sufficient unto themselves. At the Arsenale, John Pawson raises pedestals and walls of rooms that, with their indifference, reconstruct the "white cube" of the traditional museum that places a frame around everything. It is curious that such a traditional form is used to exhibit what should be the most advanced expressions of contemporary architectural culture. Nevertheless, we discover that there is not much difference between a museum-type approach and a commercial (or trade-fair) approach: both are functional to the identification of the product.

The second approach was attempted by Fuksas at the last Biennial, and was the reason why he lost the directorship, possibly the victim of architects' fear of seeing their presumed specificity sacrificed on the altar of multimediality. Although he too naively embraced all forms of communication, Fuksas at least recognized the right of architecture to use new tools to manipulate the physical environment. After having seen this most recent Biennial, so mummified into a passive reproduction of buildings, we must ask ourselves why we should not continue to explore the multimedia jungle, so varied and so risky. When all is said and done, there are examples of renowned architects who, in experimenting forms of exhibiting, entered into fields of communication not contemplated by their own production: a single example will suffice, that of the Terragni's "Sala O" at the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, so different from his usual abstract rigour. If Terragni could use all the means at his disposal to put in place his agit-prop, if every contemporary artist may express his or her discourse through multiple media, it is not clear why Sudjic has so decisively rejected recent forms of communication (or possibly it is only too clear). In the current Biennial, there is no lack of interactive environments and installations, for example the Spanish Pavilion, or Austria, Switzerland, Canada and Yokohama's presentation of the Terminal in the English Pavilion. However, since these are only episodes within a general discourse on architecture, they do not do much to advance research, and show that these exhibitions are frequently the victims of a search for effects that are goals unto themselves. The chip-board houses of "Lonely Living" designed by young Italian architects are a case apart. In their desperate attempt to become real architecture (which they are not) they renounce exhibiting themselves and remain closed within themselves, forced into too small a space that nullifies all distance. They are not objects that can be circumscribed, but neither are they environments that can be occupied by the public, and so they become a curious negative hybrid between the first and the second approach.

The third approach is hardly ever attempted in this Biennial, and comes about through an unusual sensitivity of designer or curator. Ireland, relegated to a small corner of the Italian pavilion, presents an arrangement of full-scale parts of the structure of Limerick County Hall designed by the duo Bucholz-Mc Evoy, proposed by Commissioner Raymund Ryan. Instead of being the latest in a long series of passive examples of facades, the building elements here define the environment of the room, act as a support for the drawings. Placed in a different context from that of the original building, they speak at one and the same time of the distant building and of its way of communicating in the exhibition: they are both here and elsewhere. The beams and the mouldings are building, exhibition support and visible proof that is confronted with the graphical representations in a never-ending exchange of roles. The concrete model of Cologne Diocesan Museum by Peter Zumthor is a building that speaks of another building: a structure that lies somewhere between the large-scale relief model and the small house. It covers visitors like a hat and allows them to perceive the wall-diaphragm that illuminates the inside. From the other relief models and drawings in the exhibition we discover, though, that it only represents a part of the whole, whereas the museum includes other structures. The stratification and the inner emptying that characterises the project pass from one representation to the other, from a spatial experience to the interpretation of a drawing. Architecture, ever elusive, exists within different reincarnations of itself.

These two examples are among the few true moments of discovery in a review that otherwise contains nothing out of the ordinary, where the projects that are presented do not define any exhibitive situation. Indeed, this Biennial rejects both contemporary installation research and the modern tradition of exhibitions (for example the inventions by Kiesler, Bayer or indeed Albini and Scarpa) and that is all those forms that try or have tried to project architecture beyond its boundaries. If great (and ephemeral) public occasions such as the Biennial do not promote experimentation with forms of exhibition and confrontation among different forms of research, what else are we left with? Individual exhibitions can never provide such an extended occasion. So the question is postponed: which architectural exhibition will next raise the problem of exhibiting architecture?

Pietro Valle
carlini.valle@libero.it
[21sep2002]

 

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