Working with artist Marcus Taylor, architects Caruso St John decided to leave the pavilion entirely empty and erect a great scaffolding structure around it to support a new public space above, through which the building’s tiled rooftop pokes like a lonely island. The British pavilion received an honourable mention too, which is richly deserved for its premise, but perhaps less so for its execution. The Biennale jury rarely picks my favourite, but this year Switzerland rightfully won the Golden Lion. It feels like a place where estate agents might go to die, trapped in an endless purgatory of oversized kitchens, minute bedrooms and corridors to nowhere. Decorated with a generic palette of plasterboard walls, skirting boards, wooden floors and off-the-shelf fittings, it has an eerie clinical neutrality. There are Lilliputian doors leading into Brobdingnagian kitchens, corridors that taper to nothing and ceilings that rise and plunge from room to room, inducing agora - and claustrophobia by turn. This year’s standout genius is to be found in the Swiss pavilion, where a group of young architects has concocted a surreal stage set of the ubiquitous show home, creating a labyrinthine sequence of shifts in scale. Photograph: British Council/Cultureshock Media The rest could be of some interest, if the subject matter were given more space to breathe in a dedicated exhibition of its own.īritish Pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2018. As ever, there is a lot of rubbish, punctuated by occasional moments of brilliance. Sixty-five countries now compete with ever more impenetrable displays in the Giardini and at the back of the Arsenale, making the challenge to see them all in a couple of days an act of supreme endurance for even the most devout architecture enthusiast. Nonetheless, the soul-cleansing of the papal pavilions was welcome after being subjected to the architectural equivalent of the Eurovision song contest. Since minimalism has become the language of luxury, it all felt a bit too much like a spa retreat. Modesty and simplicity were the keywords of the brief, which has led to some pleasantly spartan enclosures to sit and rest in but it feels like a bit of a missed opportunity to indulge in the kind of camp theatrics of which the Catholic church is so fond.Ī young practice such as Space Popular, whose work revels in frenzied pattern-clashing and eye-searing colour combos ( sadly confined to a small model in an exhibition across town) could have added a dose of gaudy glory to the rather solemn proceedings. Occupying newly landscaped woodlands behind the Palladian church of San Giorgio Maggiore, the chapels range from a subtly tapered stone box by Eduardo Souto de Moura, to a rugged concrete cylinder by Smiljan Radic, and a curving timber trellis by Norman Foster, soon to be engulfed with jasmine flowers. Photograph: Mirco Toniolo/Errebi/Rex/Shutterstock Soon to be engulfed with flowers … Norman Foster’s timber trellis chapel.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |