Starchitects in Venice

[imomus]

I've been dreaming about Venice recently. In my dreams I'm sitting with a friend in a huge cruise liner which plows down the Grand Canal. We jump out from time to time to see radically refurbished palazzi housing exciting experimental installations. It's clear where my dream comes from: this time last year I was just preparing for two visits to Venice, one to conduct workshops at a conference called Teach Me, the other to perform my first concert in the city.

This September I have no glamorous Mediterranean gigs co-inciding with art conferences -- although October will see a visit to London's Frieze Art Fair and a concert at the Kosmopolis Literary Festival in Barcelona (October 20th). But if you want a culture-rich "fantasy holiday in Venice", come with me to the excellent Venice Super Blog covering the Architecture Biennale currently occupying the national pavilions at the Giardini.



Despite the presence of "starchitects" like Rem Koolhaas talking about his work in the Gulf, or artists like Olafur Eliasson, talking about his contribution to architectural projects in Iceland and Denmark, it's interesting to see how the architects seem to feel overshadowed by the art biennial.

Sarah Ichioka reports her friend Leah asking "Why are all of the architects that I've met at the Biennale embarrassed to say that they are architects? They all introduce themselves as 'curators' or 'installation artists' or 'researchers' or 'critics'". And Shumon Basar laments that "this congregation of A-list architects, curators, and critics—though celebrated widely in the specialist press that also descends upon the carnival—are unlikely to make it to the front page of newspapers or TV headlines. They just don’t quite cut it. This relative lack of populist attention puts that contemporary phrase du jour, ‘The Starchitect’, in a humbling, relativistic perspective. Should this be a cause for dismay or dejection? Or does the lack of a broader attention point to a deeper problem suffered by any desire to exhibit architecture or urbanism on a par with its more glamorous sibling, the art world?"

The British pavilion features a very shelfish presentation of the city of Sheffield. Curator Jeremy Till explains that he's chosen artists rather than architects to give the human feel of Sheffield because architects tend to focus too much on the 1:100 - 1:500 scales; the bird's eye view. Japan has an interactive weave hut (pictured above) and some striped vernacular architecture. The Canadians have the largest sweater in the world and some bicycles powering a Madonna / Pet Shop Boys video. Latvia's pavilion is made of folded cardboard and sits outside the Arsenale. The Belgians are celebrating The Beauty of the Ordinary with mirrors and pebbles. The Germans have installed a red roof and the French have a bunch of "clochard chic" architects living amongst scaffolding, cooking and conversing in their space, which features a sauna on the roof. The French are the clear winners, on cool alone. But most agree that this biennial is about cities, not countries.

I found the ruminations of one Rowan Moore interesting. Reporting a discussion with Saskia Sassen, he summed things up with: "So you have ever more gigantic building projects, inequalities, shocking poverty, astonishing urban inventions, driven by necessity. You have catastrophes... You have the erosion of the public, including public space. What possible connection has all this to do with the decision architects make sat at their computers, when they choose to arrange building materials in this or that configuration? Especially as the beauty of cities is in their messiness, which allows all kinds of histories to be made, whereas most architects that I know of like things orderly and empty."

"The beginnings of the answer go something like this. Architecture is an ultimately measured intervention -- in other words architects whether they like it or not are always going to be a little straight compared to the messy vitality of cities. So the trick is to make sure there's a conversation between the orderly and the messy. And perhaps that intervention could be a more complex smaller scale presence in public space. Perhaps there could be an engagement with street level complexity."

At the Doge's Palace, Moore was asked an "urgent beauty question": "What new word is there that can be used instead of beauty? In other words how do you describe that experience of the world acquiring extra dimensions and perspectives which is what we really want architecture to do?"

Comments

[kaipfeiffer.livejournal.com]

nick, refering to your story "seven lies about holger hiller", which i read late at night but still conscious enough to experience some other-word-ly excitation.
it reminded me somehow of austrian writer h. c. artmann (also member of the "wiener gruppe" with gerhard ruehm, oswald wiener, etc), who had, sadly, almost no recognition in the english-speaking parts of the world (or any non-german speaking, for that matter), although he himself mastered an enormous amount of languages, translating from many of them - sometimes poetry that doesn't even exist, like his "translation" of ancient religious celtic poetry "der schluessel des heiligen patrick" ("the key of st. patrick") from gaelic (?), where it was later revealed he also wrote the "original" himself.
(h. c. once was interviewd by a college radio in st. louis, though. but he was cut off the air right after he began to answer the first question with "i am an anarchist ...")
master of the imago, in his work, he has enormous layers of always wordplayful references, happily linking fairy tale figures like "frau holle" to heinz edelmanns "yellow submarine". his command of the german language, unsurpassed in my, erh, book, makes him quite hard to translate.
anyway, your story made me really hope you will write that book you announced on the lifes of fictional composers. it made me extremely happy (ok: "thanky you, ch. k. for making n. c. write it" - with pressed lips)

(just checked at amazon.com: there's at least a translation of his only, short, but as usual poetically dense novel "The Quest for Dr. U: Or a Solitary Mirror in Which the Day Reflects")

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I've never heard of Artmann, but he sounds intriguing.

I also thought this short story, which I really hadn't reread since writing it, might be the key to "Lives of the Composers", which I've been rather blocked with.

[kaipfeiffer.livejournal.com]

in fact, already while reading the first few parts of the story, i was convinced your idea for the book was based on that story.
i wish to read a whole book like that from you.

artmann is amongst my literary idols, he also created himself as a fascinating and humorous persona.
here's his sparse english wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._C._Artmann
and here are four poems translated in english:
http://www.jbeilharz.de/artmann/artmann-e.html

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ah, through the Wiener Gruppe he must have collaborated quite closely with Ernst Jandl, which recommends him already to me!

[kaipfeiffer.livejournal.com]

i'd say, artmann and jandl are two of the most elevating poets of the german language after ww II in austria, and they developped new approaches at the same time, like "lautgedichte" ("soundpoems"), working with abstracted language used for its sound - close to onomatopoeia. artmann was also famous for a series of poems in his artificial verison of the viennese dialect, and wrote much prose and short scenes for theatre, though always with a poets approach to language, and thus extremely dense.
they were contemporaries, but i don't think they worked together, since jandl was not part of the wiener gruppe.
(my favorite jandl poem might be his shortest, in which he treated his war experiences:
"schtzngrm"
it's the pressed pronounciation of "schuetzengraeben" = "trenches")