Hasta La Ideas

As the Venice Architecture Biennale 2012 draws to a close, we take a look back at the five exhibitions and pavilions that were most popular with Dezeen readers, as well as the biggest news stories to come out of the event.

Visitors were queuing up get into the Russian Pavilion (top), which was covered in QR codes, and it was also the most-clicked pavilion on Dezeen. Tablet computers revealed the information hidden within the codes, which contained ideas for a new city dedicated to science.

Our most popular story from the Arsenale featured Herzog & de Meuron’s unfinished Elbphilharmonie concert hall, which was displayed as a series of models carved from foam and hung from the ceiling (above).

In third place was Zaha Hadid’s exhibition centred around a pleated metal funnel (above), intended to show the studio’s explorations of tensile structures and lightweight shells.

Norman Foster created a dramatic entrance to the Arsenale (above) by projecting names of people in the architecture industry over the floor and columns, while images of well-known public spaces flashed across the walls in time to a thundering soundtrack.

Also popular was Justin McGuirk and Urban-Think Tank’s investigation into how a vertical slum in Caracas could set an example for new forms of urban housing, which featured photography by Iwan Baan and was awarded the Golden Lion for best project. Find out more in our interviews with McGuirk and Baan.

The other Golden Lions were awarded to Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza Vieira, in recognition of his lifetime achievements in architecture, and the Japanese Pavilion, where Toyo Ito presented alternative housing concepts for homes destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami of 2011.

This year’s event also saw Austrian architect Wolf D. Prix attack biennale director David Chipperfield for placing too much emphasis on celebrity, while Chipperfield himself urged architects to avoid becoming “urban decorators” by addressing the problems with everyday architecture rather than simply focusing on iconic project such as theatres and museums.

See all our coverage of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2012 »

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News: following this week’s news that the UK government is restricting curved and glass walls on new school buildings, Aberrant Architecture‘s Kevin Haley and David Chambers are urging the Department of Education to look to the standardised schools designed by Oscar Niemeyer for Brazil in the 1980s, which the architects are presenting in the British Pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale.

“Learning lessons from school-building in Brazil helps us develop the new ideas that are sorely needed to improve the design and production of school buildings in the UK,” said Chambers, while Haley explained how the pair are ”using the research we have collected to investigate the design potential for a similar approach for the UK.”

The standardised ‘baseline’ templates for primary and secondary schools published this week place restrictions on room sizes, storey heights and building shapes for 261 replacement school buildings planned across the UK, as part of a bid to cut costs.

In response Haley has said: ”In Brazil, the design of the 508 Integrated Centres of Public Education (CIEPs) was not simply standardised to reduce costs. The highly ambitious design, shared by each school, induces a global perception of a standard, a new standard – a standard of high quality.”

Above: Animating Education at the British Pavilion

Like Brazil’s CIEPs, Haley proposes that the UK should “allow our schools to become more open to their context” and suggests that “each region could create its own standardised design, incorporating local cultural and climatic requirements.”

“The idea that every community, from suburb to favela, can take pride in first-class architecture, giving every child the same opportunities, is certainly a compelling ideal, especially today, when modern society in Brazil, as well as increasingly in the UK, is more and more divided between rich and poor,” said Haley.

Above: Animating Education at the British Pavilion

Aberrant Architecture’s initial research is documented in their exhibition “Animating Education” at the biennale, where they are showing models to represent each of the CIEPs completed in Brazil.

Read more about the government restrictions in our earlier story.

See more stories about Aberrant Architecture »

Here’s the full statement from Kevin Haley:

The pressing need in the UK to build new primary schools to address overcrowded classrooms and growing competition for school places thus begs the question: what lessons can we learn from the CIEPs example? Which of the ideas championed by Brazil should we adopt and which ideas can we build upon?

Above: Animating Education at the British Pavilion

In the 1980s, Rio de Janeiro, much like the UK now, had limited money to spend on education. In response to this, Oscar Niemeyer put forward a standardized design for the CIEPs. The strong design of his principle educational building, prefabricated to ensure consistent quality, contained architectural spaces, using strong durable materials that were specifically designed to support, help and enhance the educational curriculum. Architectural additions such as the dedicated sports hall, library, canteen & rooftop housing spaces, supported and enhanced the recreational, cultural, nutritional & residential aspects of the full time program. These standardised elements could be arranged in multiple configurations in order to respond to varying site conditions.

Money saved through standardisation could subsequently be invested into the curriculum. Schools could offer a full time curriculum available from 7am – 10pm. CIEP programs not only respected students’ cultures but also enhanced them. Some subjects were not taught if they were not beneficial to the class of children. Other subjects were therefore introduced, creating a personalised curriculum. Such an idea could no doubt also be used to address the increasingly culturally diverse communities of the UK.

The full time curriculum helped working parents avoid expensive childcare, a very pertinent problem in the UK today. It also gave those from poorer backgrounds access to a wider range of cultural stimuli. Three meals a day, designed by a nutritionist, helped the diets of some of the undernourished children. It could be argued that childhood obesity, rather than undernourishment, is the problem in the UK. But in any case, being offered the option of three healthy meals a day would no doubt make a huge difference in a lot of cases.

Above: Animating Education at the British Pavilion

Each region of the UK could create its own standardised design, incorporating local cultural and climatic requirements. The constant would be the full time education and the commitment to taking care of the children’s individual needs.

In Brazil, it was put to us that the design of the 508 CIEPs was not simply standardized to reduce costs. The highly ambitious design, shared by each school, induces a global perception of a standard, a new standard – a standard of high quality. The high architectural standard on the outside subsequently encourages a perception of high quality education on the inside. The idea that every community, from suburb to favela, can take pride in first-class architecture, giving every child the same opportunities, is certainly a compelling ideal – especially today, when modern society in Brazil, as well as increasingly in the UK, is more and more divided between rich and poor.

Whilst we understand the arguments for standardisation of the CIEPs it would be interesting to see how you could adjust the model school a little bit more, to better suit each individual site. Perhaps this can be achieved by starting with the CIEP model of having a main classroom block and regular CIEP accessories, such as the sports hall, library building or swimming pool, and then being able to add to or change some of these accessories later on.

Above: Animating Education at the British Pavilion

A very interesting strategy would be to allow our schools to become more open to their context. Perhaps these new accessories could create additional openness between the school and its surroundings, placing the School in the context of its neighbourhood rather than as some kind of alien visitor.

Take a covered playground as an example, a more strategic solution could be if it worked more as a city square and brought more people into the schools. This idea starts to become interesting in the UK context because this space could fill the role of a public square, which is often non-existent in many British suburbs.

Since the school is arguably the most important public building in our communities it could start to provide more functions related for the common use. School accessories could include an ‘IT room’ as well as a multi-purpose arts and culture building, which could then be used for theatre, dance and martial arts, as well as provide a space for filming and editing movies. Such a space would not only appeal to the students but also to their parents as well.

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in Brazil” says Aberrant Architecture appeared first on Dezeen.

This movie by filmmakers Stretch documents the ongoing work by Cape Town studio Noero Architects to create a cultural centre within the barracks of Port Elizabeth that were once used as a concentration camp.

The barracks were dismantled and reassembled in Red Location Precinct after the Boer War, before becoming the first community of black African families in South Africa during the racial segregation at the start of the twentieth century.

Noero Architects have designed a complex centred around a museum for the centre of the historic settlement, which is under construction and due for completion in 2022.

“We thought, what better place in Port Elizabeth than to use Red Location as the new cultural centre of the city?” explained Jo Noero. “Where you could bring together the histories of the Afrikaner people and the histories of the black African people and show that they both suffered in different ways at different times, under different groups and regimes. In a way it was about talking about a real form of reconciliation.”

The movie was completed after the opening of the exhibition and shows some of the completed buildings of the project and how they fit in amongst the existing urban fabric.

“The best public space in South Africa is the street and the way in which life happens along its edges,” said Noero. “What we did at Red Location was to reinforce the idea of street and where we make bigger spaces we simply created indentations in the buildings which come directly off the street”.

Plan detail – click above for larger image

Noero has also produced a nine-metre-long, hand-drawn plan to illustrate the proposals, which he is presenting at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

When discussing the use of hand drawings, Noero said “there is nothing that the computer can do that can replicate that sense of control that you have by drawing by hand. When you draw by the hand you connect with your mind and your heart, and it is an action that you can control.”

See more stories from the Venice Architecture Biennale »

Here’s a few lines of text about the exhibition:

“South African Architect Jo Noero’s work has always been sensitive to the divided and contested urban conditions of his country’s cities, and his installation here reflects thus through two powerful artworks.

Above: exhibition at the Arsenale Corderie

One is a 9m-long hand drawing, depicting at 1:100 the Red Location Precinct in Port Elizabeth, a project that proposes common ground in a city torn apart by the urbanistic consequences of apartheid. Next to it is the artwork Keiskamma Guernica, a tapestry made by fifty women from the Hamburg Women’s Co-operative from the Eastern Cape.

Above: exhibition at the Arsenale Corderie

These two meticulous, labour-intensive works are contrasting and complementary pieces of evidence of an urban condition where common ground is not easily achieved.”

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by Noero Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

News: the New York Times has published a scathing news report about the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale, claiming “the less said, the better.”

The article declares the theme of “Common Ground,” chosen by director David Chipperfield, to be “a missed opportunity” to draw attention away from “glamorous buildings and celebrated designers” towards “broader issues like urbanism, public space, social responsibility and collaboration.”

“The show mostly just glides over issues like public housing and health, the environment, informal settlements, economic decline and protest,” says reporter Michael Kimmelman. ”It pays almost no attention to the developing world, to designers from Africa or China, and precious little to female architects, aside from Zaha Hadid, who, like Peter Zumthor, Renzo Piano, Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi and a surprising number of the old boldface names, hogs much of the spotlight.”

Projects by Indian architect Anupama Kundoo and Urban-Think Tank are named as exceptions, but overall Kimmelman claims “the exhibition still positions architects as producers of surplus value through aesthetic quality.”

The article follows a controversial statement made by architect Wolf D. Prix of Coop Himmelb(l)au that claimed the biennale places too much importance on celebrity – see the story and comments »

Hear more about the theme in our interview with director David Chipperfield »
See all our coverage of the biennale » 

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“missed opportunity” – New York Times appeared first on Dezeen.

In the first of three movies filmed at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Reinier de Graaf of OMA talks about Pimlico School, a brutalist building in London that was demolished last year and which features in OMA’s Public Works exhibition of “masterpieces by bureaucrats” at the biennale.

Pimlico School was designed by John Bancroft of the Greater London Council’s architecture department and was constructed in the 1960s. Its demolition to make room for a new building followed a long campaign to have it listed. ”The architect campaigned very actively but he wasn’t a star architect,” de Graaf told Dezeen. “They took him to the demolition site and all he could murmur was ‘bloody fools, bloody fools.’”

De Graaf explains that although they weren’t credited by name for their work, architects working in government departments during the 1960 and 1970s created buildings with “enormous vitality and an impressive social mission.”

Read more about the exhibition in our earlier story | See all our coverage from the Venice Architecture Biennale

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bloody fools” appeared first on Dezeen.