Vatican Breathes Life Into an Exhibit
VENICE — There are six countries participating for the first time in the Venice Architecture Biennale, here through November, but the most surprising new entry, surely, is the Vatican. For centuries, one of the world’s great patrons when it comes to public architecture, the Holy See had never, until now, participated in this global architecture exhibition.
However, it should not be surprising, given church tradition, that the Vatican’s pavilion consists of a pilgrimage of sorts: an installation of 10 chapels by a dozen architects in a densely wooded garden, nestled in an island in the Venetian lagoon.
That pilgrimage was a little treacherous on a recent May morning, as earthmovers leveled dirt paths made mucky by days of rain, and the sounds of chain saws and hammers occasionally drowned out the chirping birds and water lapping against the shore of the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore.
Gingerly navigating puddles and potholes, Francesco Dal Co, the curator of the pavilion, gave a tour of the site: 10 chapels designed by an international roster of architects that Mr. Dal Co said he chose because they “had different structural conceptions and worked in different materials.” They include two Pritzker Prize winners, Norman Foster and Eduardo Souto de Mouro.
Normally, national pavilions at the Biennale tend to showcase renderings, models, and sketches documenting the creation of buildings. “Vatican Chapels,” as the pavilion is called, presents the finished buildings themselves.
The architects were told to look at a building conceived nearly a century ago, the “Woodland Chapel” designed by the Swedish architect Gunnar Asplund, as a model. In a presentation of the project, Mr. Dal Co said he chose the chapel as a sort of spiritual example for the architects, describing it as a “small masterpiece.”
The first structure visitors find in the garden is a Nordic-style hut designed by Francesco Magnani and Traudy Pelzel, featuring drawings and a scale model of Asplund’s chapel.
The Paraguayan architect Javier Corvalán Espínola’s chapel is awe-inspiring, in the physical sense, for sure: Visitors stand under an enormous ring of steel tilted on a tripod.
One of the few chapels with a roof is Terunobu Fujimori’s “Cross Chapel.” Visitors enter through a narrow passage into a spare, traditional- looking chapel whose apse wall is pockmarked with charcoal pieces framing a wooden cross. Mr. Fujimori wrote in the catalog that he wanted people to “experience the sensation of the ascension of the Son of God when they see the cross.”
In some cases, Mr. Dal Co chose to contrast building materials: Francesco Cellini’s chapel, a carefully studied intersection of slim, sleek oversized black and white ceramic slabs, for example, was juxtaposed with “Morning Chapel” by the Barcelona architects Ricardo Flores and Eva Prats, made with the much earthier looking Venetian cocciopesto, a material made of crushed tiles.
To convince Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi — who is the Vatican’s de facto culture minister — that the Vatican should show finished works rather than models and plans, Mr. Dal Co told the cardinal that architecture shows normally “represent the carnal union between a father and a mother but not the creation that comes of it.” The time had come to breathe life into those static renderings, he argued.
There is already considerable discussion on what will happen to the chapels once the exhibition closes in November.
For nearly 70 years, the island has been home to the Giorgio Cini Foundation, an organization devoted to scholarly pursuits. And the garden hosting the Vatican pavilion, which the foundation manages, is normally off-limits to the public.
Renata Codello, the foundation’s director, said she would be pleased if the chapels remained here.
“A great park of sculptures and religious architecture would give us many themes to reflect on,” she said.