Architecture, water & history
Visit Venice during an architecture Biennale and enjoy the best of both worlds: the astounding design of an ancient city and an incredible window on some of the globe’s best new designs. Michael Barrett attends the ‘Olympics of architecture’.
It’s not entirely accurate, or remotely fair, to assess a city by the quality of the arrival experience, but it’s often those first experiences that linger on in the memory after others have faded.
Whether it’s the first sights, sounds, colours and smells, the heat and humidity, or general organisational capabilities of the populace – you can make some general observations about a place during the first 60 minutes on the ground.
In Singapore, for instance, the journey to the city is a streamlined course through lush plantings, pruned to perfection. Nature bent to the city’s will, a reasonable metaphor for a place of swift and sure development – Auckland’s frayed nikau, marooned in the motorway median strip, are meagre in comparison.
Mumbai’s duality is revealed in a night-time cab ride from airport to city, where streets of cardboard housing presage modern apartment developments beyond. In London’s dim and grey, an overpriced train ride past row houses awaits.
It’s not fair to compare anything to Venice. The city known as la Serenissima (the ‘‘most serene’’) puts it money where its moniker is. The trip from Marco Polo Airport, on the mainland, to the island city is a leisurely exercise. It’s a 10-minute stroll to the lagoon edge, where you buy a vaporetto (ferry) ticket before chugging through the green water among a phalanx of stylish wooden motoscafi (water taxis).
If you’re heading for the northeast corner of the city, as I was, you’ll be on the Blu line; there’s a stop at Murano, the famous island of glass-making, before the ferry skirts the red-brick flank of the cemetery island, Isola di San Michele, and you disembark on the Fondamente Nove (the ‘‘new’’ foundation, a promenade that, in the 16th century, was put in place to extend the city’s boundary further out into the lagoon).
By this stage, you’re quite aware that Venice is three things: architecture, water and history. Built on 117 islands, it is separated by canals and connected by ramped bridges and a labyrinth of lanes. Cheek-by-jowl throughout are palazzo and piazza, campo and cathedrals, all hoisted aloft by millions of 60-foot-long timber piles, sourced, hundreds of years ago, from Balkan forests.
However, Venice is not, solely for enthusiasts of things ‘‘old’’. Every two years, the city hosts an architecture Biennale (biennale means ‘‘every two years’’), the preeminent global exhibition for contemporary architecture.
This year, 62 countries, incuding New Zealand, have sent exhibitions to Venice, where they will be on display until the end of November.
Tony van Raat – an architect, architectural educator and Commissioner of New Zealand’s exhibition at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale – is well qualified to talk about the Biennale and the wider attractions of Venice.
By his reckoning, he’s been there 15 times. Half of those trips have been with students, ‘‘because architecture students need to see Venice’’.
The other half, ‘‘Well, I just like walking around it. What did someone once say, ‘I lived in Venice and I suddenly realised that my dream had become my address.’ Venice is unlike anywhere else. It tells us a whole lot of things about urban scale and fabric, and how the condition of the buildings is not very important
in terms of their delight.’’
In fact, the trouble with running an exhibition in Venice, says van Raat, ‘‘is that the city itself surpasses anything you can place in it, no matter how good your show is, the city is always the star.’’ Of course, this doesn’t stop anyone trying.
This year, New Zealand’s exhibition, Future Islands ,isan archipelago of 22 beautiful cloudlike forms suspended in the top floor of a 16th-century renaissance mansion, Palazzo Bollani. Bollani is located halfway between the Piazza San Marco (which, with the Doge’s Palace, is on van Raat’s list of ‘‘absolutely essential’’ things to do in Venice) and the Arsenale, the epicentre of the Biennale in the east.
Bollani overlooks the Rio della Pieta, a canal that intersects with Venice’s busy main boulevard, the Riva degli Schiavone, on which thousands of tourists traipse daily past the stalls and hawkers selling masks and other mementos, tea towels, selfie sticks and snacks.
The New Zealand exhibition is impressive in scope and ambition. Charles Walker, the creative director, says Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities provided a kernel of inspiration. In the book, Marco Polo recounts stories of 55 wondrous cities to Kublai Kahn.
However, the stories are about one city – Venice. Walker, in structuring his exhibition, selected 55 examples of New Zealand architecture to represent not just the diversity, skill and ideas of New Zealand’s architects, but the different stories we tell about ourselves through our buildings.
As an exhibition, Future Islands is ephemeral, compelling and quietly beautiful; it provides a rare perspective on our New World architecture in Old World Venice.
At this, the ‘‘Olympics of architecture’’, New Zealand’s architectural ideas stand up with the best of them. Van Raat describes the exhibition as ‘‘exhibiting a range of actualities and possibilities, indicating what’s happening on our architectural front, and perhaps indicating what, in the future, may occur on our islands’’.
Visiting Venice during Biennale season provides opportunities to visit two parts of the city that are otherwise off the beaten track. Established Biennale nations exhibit in the Giardini – the Biennale Gardens, one of Venice’s greenest areas, and worth visiting just to see the 30 pavilions owned by countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Brazil and Switzerland.
The Nordic Pavilion, van Raat says, is the best of them. ‘‘It is an absolutely stupendous work,’’ he says. The building, stripped back to almost nothing, is almost transparent. ‘‘Sverre Fenn, the architect, created an extraordinary grid with incredibly deep and very shallow columns. They’re almost like sheets of paper – with trees growing through them.’’
The Arsenale, the Biennale’s other main area and Venice’s historic naval centre dates back to the 12th century. It’s the place, apocryphally, where Napoleon was shown the rudder of a ship in the morning and the completed vessel in the afternoon.
The Venetians were prefabricating well before ‘‘prefab’’ became a ‘‘thing’’. Encircled by high brick walls, dotted with statues of winged lions, the city’s emblem, the Arsenale is a destination in its own right. During the Biennale, the Corderie, the 300-metre-long building of vaulted brick and concrete columns where ropes and riggings were once made is filled with 75 installations by some of the best architects in the world.
In May, during the opening days of the Biennale, van Raat led several New Zealanders on an architectural city tour. Top of his list of places to visit was the Punta de la Dogana, a 350-year-old former Customs house that has been transformed into an art gallery by Japanese architect Tadao Ando. The building, exceptionally sited at the tip of an island in the Dorsoduro district, pointing out towards the apex of the Grand and Giudecca Canals, has a largely unchanged exterior.
The interior, however, is ‘‘a masterwork of the current generation of architects’’, van Raat says. ‘‘It is a sublime sequence of calm, static spaces enhanced by faultlessly meticulous craftwork. I’ve been told Ando has a secret about how he makes his concrete, he makes it like marble; it becomes a precious material, faultless, like silk.’’
The Querini Stampalia, ‘‘a masterwork of Carlo Scarpa, an architect of a previous generation’’, was the second highlight of the tour. There are two interesting parts to Scarpa’s work, the water gate and garden, van Raat says.
‘‘The garden is a wonderful exercise in detail. It’s of a suburban scale – and it’s a real lesson in what you can do with a relatively small space. So it’s just worth, as with Ando, seeing how an architect works into the existing fabric, being uncompromising modern and different but still sensitive.’’
The best place to take a break? The Ospedale Civile (civil hospital) and the church of San Giovani e Paolo, he says. ‘‘It’s a wonderful urban set piece. You’ve got two very different buildings in juxtaposition: the hospital’s Trompe L’oeil renaissance fac¸ade of polychrome marble banged hard up against the raw brickwork of the gothic church of St Giovanni e Paolo.
Then there is the very wellconfigured public space, Campo San Giovanni e Paolo, punctuated by an equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni surrounded by the tables of cafes and restaurants. It’s a lovely place to be.’’
Venice, famously, is a place to be happily lost. And van Raat agrees with this sentiment. ‘‘Now when I go to Venice, I just wander around aimlessly looking for cafes and bars.
‘‘Just being in the present, not on a mission, to get a sense of what it’s like to be there, without a timetable or schedule. You’ve always got a choice, haven’t you. You can go broad and shallow, or narrow and deep – and narrow and deep is always the best way.’’