Monthly Archive for September, 2010

Now Available–Conference Dinner at Venice’s Restaurant Corte Sconta

Published on September 25, 2010 in Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

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The 2010 Constructed Environment Conference delegates and plenary speakers will gather together for the conference dinner on Thursday, 18 November at Restaurant Corte Sconta in Venice.

The Corte Sconta is now an important point of reference on the Venetian restaurant scene. Quality and freshness are ensured by using strictly seasonal products, attentively served in a space more geared to function than to form.

The meal will include their acclaimed antipasti, fresh vegetables and local seafood delivered daily, handmade pasta made fresh each day, along with a delicate desert. Their special house blend of Prosecco will also be served during the course of meal. The entire meal will offer you a pleasant memory and yet another reason for coming back to Venice.

To reserve your place at the dinner, or for more information, please visit the Activities & Extras webpage.

René Davids FAIA, UC Berkeley School of Architecture, to give plenary in Venice, Italy

Published on September 21, 2010 in Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

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Professor René Davids will be joining the 2010 Constructed Environment Conference as a plenary speaker this November at its annual conference in Venice, Italy, held alongside the 12th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale.

René Davids, FAIA (born Santiago, Chile) received his bachelor of architecture degree from the Universidad de Chile and on a British Council Fellowship, a master’s degree in environmental design from the Royal College of Art in London. He headed a Diploma School Unit at the Architectural Association School for eight years and also taught at the Royal College of Art and the Macintosh School in Glasgow. Before becoming Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the UC Berkeley School of Architecture, he taught architecture at the University of California, San Diego, the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago and the University of New Mexico. René Davids is Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and a member of the Colegio de Arquitectos de Chile. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a Progressive Architecture Award for research on the hillside elevators of Valparaíso, Chile and is currently working on a book that examines the relationship between technology, topography and urbanism in selected North and South American cities. More…

The 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale

Published on September 20, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

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From Phaidon…

The Architecture Biennale, which takes places every two years in Venice, is one of the main events in the architecture world. The biennale is composed of two parts: a main exhibition, curated this year by Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima, and 62 national pavilions, each managed individually. Alongside these exhibitions, there are a whole host of architectural events taking place throughout the city.  The main exhibition is itself split between two primary venues: the Arsenale, which has been both the military and then the industrial centre of historical Venice and famously has peeling walls, brick columns and a hefty dose of atmosphere, and the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, a late-nineteenth-century building constructed specifically for exhibitions, with white walls and square rooms. In these widely varied spaces, 47 participants were invited to consider the theme chosen by Sejima for this 12th biennale, ‘People Meet in Architecture’.

Architecture exhibitions inevitably have to tread a thin line between creating a direct experience of space and providing a background for the process of making buildings. In this iteration of the biennale, most of the participants seemed to take the theme as a directive to privilege the human relationships fostered by architecture over an explanation of the process of making it, an agreeable situation for any visitor tasked with absorbing over 100 individual installations.  More…

Modern Primitives by Aranda\Lasch

Published on September 15, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

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From Dezeen…

Venice Architecture Biennale 2010: New York studio Aranda\Lasch have installed a collection of seating that’s made up of foam pyramids at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

FENDI and Aranda\Lasch present Modern Primitives
An installation combining technology, craftsmanship and tradition

FENDI consolidates its relationship with the world of Limited Edition Design by partnering with the New York based architectural studio Aranda\Lasch with a two-step project starting at Venice Biennale of Architecture in August 2010 and seeing its completion at Design Miami/ in December 2010.

At the Venice Biennale of Architecture, starting on August 26th, FENDI will be supporting the installation the architectural duo have been commissioned by the Pritzker Price Winner and Biennale Curator Kazuyo Sejima. More…

Emergency Exit by Agnieszka Kurant and Aleksandra Wasilkowska

Published on September 14, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

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From Dezeen…

Venice Architecture Biennale 2010: visitors to the Polish pavilion at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale launch themselves off a pile of birdcages into a sea of artificial clouds.

Emergency Exit.
Agnieszka Kurant and Aleksandra Wasilkowska

Polish Pavilion at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice

‘A neon Emergency Exit sign hangs on the facade of the Polish Pavilion. Inside, a surreal structure made of hundreds of reclaimed bird cages hides a path to its summit.

It is lit from within, suggesting a night landscape, a fantastical de-materialized world containing an object and an action. You climb the seemingly precarious structure. At the height of the summit you look down into a churning sea of clouds. Your breath catches, your pulse quickens; you look down, then out, and then leap blindly into the void. . . More

Vacant NL by Rietveld Landscape

Published on September 13, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

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From Dezeen…

Venice Architecture Biennale 2010: a blue-foam model city is suspended in the top half of the Dutch pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Thousands of buildings in the Netherlands lie vacant. Some of them for a week or a few months, many even for years. During the twelfth Venice Architecture Biennale, the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) and Rietveld Landscape will highlight the huge potential of all that temporarily unoccupied space in making the Netherlands one of the top-five knowledge economies in the world. The exhibition Vacant NL, where architecture meets ideas is a call for the intelligent reuse of temporarily vacant buildings around the world in promoting creative enterprise. The Venice Architecture Biennale takes place from 29 August 29 to 21 November 2010.

Built in 1954, the Dutch Pavilion on the biennale grounds in Venice has been empty for over 39 years. After all, it is in use for just three months each year. That makes it one of the thousands of unoccupied government buildings on Dutch soil. Rietveld Landscape, the office appointed by the NAI to curate the Dutch presentation in Venice, decided to emphasize the vacancy of the pavilion during the architecture biennale. The experience of the empty space will sink into visitors, and only then will they discover the hidden installation. More…

The Russia Factory by Sergei Tchoban, Pavel Khoroshilov and Grigory Revzin

Published on September 13, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

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From Dezeen…

Pavilion of Russia at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia

The Russia Factory

In the last 20 years Russian towns and cities have been undergoing a period of de-industrialization: old factories in industrial towns have been closing down while new ones have yet to spring up in their place. This presents serious problems for urban planning: Russia today has many towns and cities in which factories that were formerly the core of a place’s development are now at a standstill and constitute disused and ruined urban space. Industrial zones can occupy up to a third of the territory of a town or city and their current condition has a depressive influence on the environment and inhabitants.

Existing industrial zones have already had resources (energy, materials, labour) invested in them, and their destruction requires further investment – confronting us with the prospect of endless expenditure of resources since each cycle in the development of a site begins from scratch. From the point of view of urban design, factory buildings in small towns are the foundation of the urban fabric. Factories shape the scale of the towns in which they stand. It is they that store the town’s memory and determine its identity. More…

Balancing Act by Ensamble Studio

Published on September 12, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

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From Dezeen…

Venice Architecture Biennale 2010: two enormous girders slice through the Arsenale exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale thanks to Madrid architect Antón García-Abril of Ensamble Studio.

Balancing Act is a play of balance. Two structural lines in the longitudinal space of the Arsenale buildings, which operate as a reagent to modify the original space.

The interference caused by generating a diagonal incision, cuts on the bias the previous line marked by the old structure. The harmony between the two structures now contiguous forms a space from the two systems that meet, face and compare each other.

The Arsenale will be a complex compositional series, an architectural “fugue”, in which different spaces follow one another, and in which the dissonant balance of the Balancing Act is just one chord. More…

Venice Architecture Biennale 2010

Published on September 9, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

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From Wallpaper*…

Like every other conference, biennale, triennale, festival and trade show, Venice suffers badly from journalistic impatience. We’ve spent the past few weeks being buffeted by invites, sneak peeks, first glimpses and previews for this year’s 12th Architecture Biennale, so making appearance at the event itself seem rather superfluous. Happily, we were wrong, for some things can’t yet be distilled into streams of bytes for snappy global dissemination.

For a start, there’s the atmosphere. The aesthetic contradiction of bringing the latest selection of avant-garde imagery, forms, ideas and presentations to one of the world’s most harmonious and unchanged cityscapes isn’t lost on the Biennale’s participants; Venice is a place of contradictions, where black-clad, bespectacled professors of deconstructivism, parametricism and post-post modernism appear permanently intoxicated by the patina of murky canal water on ancient stone, weather-beaten facades and a sense of permanent, ongoing decay. More…

Joan of Architecture Speaks

Published on September 9, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

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From Julia M. Klein at The Wall Street Journal…

Early afternoon sunlight pours into the conservatory of Shaughnessy House, a restored Victorian mansion with Grecian columns, ornamented plaster ceilings and marble floors. A little table is set, quite elegantly, for tea. The mood is calm, tranquil, refined. Then Phyllis Lambert strides in—still, at 83, a powerful, blunt-spoken and somewhat intimidating presence.

Ms. Lambert, dubbed “Joan of Architecture” and “Citizen Lambert,” has charted an uncompromising course in the cultural world. “I don’t believe in compromise,” she says. “I think it’s a terrible word.”

The daughter of Samuel Bronfman, who founded the Seagram’s liquor empire, this Montreal native chairs the board of the Canadian Centre for Architecture—a museum she launched in 1979. She is also a leader in urban planning and preservation. But she first earned a place in architectural history when she handpicked Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, in collaboration with Philip Johnson, to design the Seagram Building (1958) in New York. More…