On a sunny early morning train in mid-October, I said goodbye to Florence and the Apt Autumn conference and made the 2-hour journey north to Venice with a tight schedule to visit the architectural biennale and revisit classics by the luminaries of Scarpa, Palladio and Sansovino. Arriving from the station mid-morning for the first time in 7 years, I’d forgotten how crowded the canals, streets and alleyways can be, and it was a slow-paced 45 minutes to navigate the city, the congested Academia crossing, to my accommodation adjacent to Scarpa’s Querini Stampalia and the Campo Santa Maria Formosa.
By early afternoon, I was entering the Biennale Gardens, where I joined fellow architectural tourists exploring the national pavilions, which generally I felt were a disappointment.
This year’s Biennale is curated by Carlo Ratti, and it remains the world’s largest architectural festival across numerous sites within the city, but predominantly located within the Giardini and Arsenale. The theme was ‘Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective’ with more than 60 participants and 300 projects to navigate. I must admit, I didn’t fully understand the title or the lengthy script that set out the exhibition theme and intentions in a tiny typeface on the Arsenale walls.
I photographed it to reread at a later date to see if it was the late nights in Florence that had induced my brain fog.
Upon entering the Arsenale, it became clear that since my last visit, there was an increased focus on making, with a lot of full-scale architectural constructions and building elements. There was also an empathy toward materiality with one of my favourite spaces, the fabulously tactile Kingdom of Morocco room, and a space called Material Palimpsest, with a beautiful arrangement of multiple pillars, all using differing natural materials of brick and earth, stone and clay, and all arranged to be complementary to each other. It was a personal highlight.
From the dark rooms of the Arsenale, then to the bright sunlight of the former shipyard’s waterside havens, complete with an impressive full-size and navigable contemporary pier that stretched onto a pontoon by Foster and Partners.
I made one final stop before leaving to locate the UAE pavilion and its contribution to the Biennale debate, given our current projects in the region. I was delighted to see full-scale rammed-earth constructions and sustainability issues being explored, all of which resonated and aligned with the Apt modular housing ideas currently being developed there.
So in conclusion, I enjoyed the Arsenale, I enjoyed the scale, ambition and skill in the making of the full-sized constructions, as well as the conversation these created related to materials. The Giardini gardens (looking tired) and National Pavilions, however, could really do with creatively raising their game. I spent that evening, before an early flight, with Venice almost to myself, as the city emptied of people after 7 o’clock. A real treat.
The city of lions nestled on the water is a special place and as magical as ever. Seven years was far too long a period to have been away.’
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