Canada Pavilion Cornelia Hahn Oberlander and BBPR
VENICE, ITALY
Built between 1954 and 1958 by the Italian architecture studio BBPR, the unique shelllike Canada Pavilion in Venice’s Giardini di Castello radiates around a central tree encased in glass and is set dramatically apart from its neoclassical neighbours, the British and German Pavilions. In 2011 the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, ON, took over the management as well as commissioning of the pavilion and began extensive renovations to update the notoriously inhospitable space, which will be unveiled for the first time this year. We hear from architect Alberico Barbiano di Belgiojoso, son of BBPR partner Lodovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso, and landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander about their work on restoring the structure. My design principles are very clear. First of all, building and site must achieve a fit. And that comes from proper grading. When I came upon the pavilion in 2016, I found that the grades surrounding the building made access very difficult. Also, it needed to have connecting paths between the British and German Pavilions, so that it was part of an exploration to go from one pavilion to the next. The landscape architect has to think very hard about how people will use the site in the twenty-first century, and how we can create better accessibility to the whole site. – Cornelia Hahn Oberlander
I knew a lot about the Canada Pavilion.
I’ve watched it develop since my childhood. It’s quite a special building because it takes into account different components. First of all, there is its “anti-monumentality,” which is interesting given it is between two super monumental pavilions. The interior space has this beautiful glass funnel, with the tree in the middle of it. All of the exhibitions have the tree as the protagonist of the space.
The basic idea was to conserve as much as possible, in the sense that, for a building of this type—small, but extremely cared for in its conception, in its structure and in the insertion of one material on the other— every detail is fundamental. This building has been restored with great care and you can still see the initial idea, which is the most important thing.
– Alberico Barbiano di Belgiojoso