Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Some Cities in Venice

Here's some of the imaginary cities presented at the Venice B, whose theme was indeed cities and society and something else.
The composite city made from projects by 20 young italian offices, in the Italian Pavilion at corderie. Each office did a part of this city, such as the cemetery by DOGMA office and this brigde by Menegati Nencini.This was in a way the most ambitious project in the biennale, with mixed results, as it ended up looking a little like Brasilia. Still it wholy embraced the notion of fantasy utopia, and we always like that. This was a COUNTRY as a ROOM and a CITY at the same time. There were many doors, and you entered through a hyper-real mirror and fluorecent light corridor. The room took the shape of Belgium, a country that can easily be described as a city or a fuzzy border between countries with more defined identities.
This was a utopia in the main pavilion that is Italia but not about Italy. Looks like a video game city, but I'm just imagining this, since in all the Biennale I didnt see a single mention of video games. And to think that a major part of the kids growing up today spent 1/3 of their time in cities inside video games like Half Life and Grand Theft Auto. Just goes to show that the next biennale should be curated by someone MUCH younger.
This is a city inside a aquarium size snow globe in the Russian Pav. You turn the handle and some romantic nostalgic music plays and snow erupts inside the post-industrial whateverville.
Magic Mountain "city" inside the curious Danish Pavilion, which pretented to look like a chinese pavilion when in fact it looked like a pavilion by the now defunct Danish firm Plot, which now is BIG and JDS.

And finally two cities from the reference wall in the Italian pavilion that is about Italy.
Aldo Rossi's Citta Analoga, 1976

and Superstudio's 1971 Prima Citta from "12 Ideal Cities".

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

poli kala ta les!