Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen Wire: architect David Chipperfield, the curator for this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, has revealed that the title for this year’s show will be Common Ground.

In a meeting with festival president Paolo Baratta and representatives from each exhibiting country Chipperfield explained his intentions to highlight the “common concerns, influences and intentions” of architecture and to address the importance of “the political, social, and public realms” between buildings.

Chipperfield was officially named as curator of the biennale a few weeks ago – read our earlier story here.

Read Chipperfield’s full statement below:

13th International Architecture Exhibition. Common Ground

The President of the Biennale di Venezia, Paolo Baratta, accompanied by the Director of the 13th International Architecture Exhibition, David Chipperfield, met today at Ca’ Giustinian with the representatives of the 41 Countries participating in the 13th Exhibition, which will take place from 29 August to 25 November 2012 at the Giardini and at the Arsenale (Preview on 27 and 28 August 2012) and in various other venues in Venice. The meeting was attended for the first time by the representatives of Kosovo, Kuwait and Peru.

The title chosen by David Chipperfield for the 13th International Architecture Exhibition is: Common Ground.
“I want this Biennale to celebrate a vital, interconnected architectural culture, and pose questions about the intellectual and physical territories that it shares. In the methods of selection of participants, my Biennale will encourage the collaboration and dialogue that I believe is at the heart of architecture, and the title will also serve as a metaphor for architecture’s field of activity.

I am interested in the things that architects share in common, from the conditions of the practice of architecture to the influences, collaborations, histories and affinities that frame and contextualise our work. I want to take the opportunity of the Biennale to reinforce our understanding of architectural culture, and to emphasise the philosophical and practical continuities that define it.

The title ‘Common Ground’ also has a strong connotation of the ground between buildings, the spaces of the city. I want projects in the Biennale to look seriously at the meanings of the spaces made by buildings: the political, social, and public realms of which architecture is a part. I do not want to lose the subject of architecture in a morass of sociological, psychological or artistic speculation, but to try to develop the understanding of the distinct contribution that architecture can make in defining the common ground of the city.

This theme is a deliberate act of resistance towards the image of architecture propagated in much of today’s media of projects springing fully formed from the minds of individual talents. I wish to promote the fact that architecture is internally connected, intellectually and practically, sharing common concerns, influences and intentions.

My method of selecting architects will reinforce the theme by making collaboration and dialogue fundamental to the Biennale. We will invite contributors to make a proposals for exhibits or installations but also ask them to propose others they want to collaborate with. In this way, the initial selection by the curatorial team is complemented by a further series of relationships initiated by selected architects.

The proposed dialogues will hopefully cross boundaries of age, style, geography and discipline. They also might identify the critical roles of other parts of architectural culture: the media, research institutions, schools, publishers, galleries, foundations and so on. The results, I hope, will use every available medium to tell stories about the common ground of the profession, and of the city.

My intention is to make neither an exclusive selection of projects on the basis of prejudice and taste, nor an uncritically inclusive exhibition. We wish to give the participants an opportunity to explain work within the wider context of architectural practice, not only as a demonstration of their own talent, but also to unite us in defining our ambitions and responsibilities.”

“By appointing Kazuyo Sejima we brought the Exhibition back into the hands of an architect – President Paolo Baratta has said – and we are now so lucky to have David Chipperfield with us. The Biennale exhibitions in recent years had broadened the representation of architecture by emphasizing its connections with a series of big social, urban, environmental and political ‘issues’. So it appeared useful to turn to an architect who demonstrates great interest in architecture as a discipline and raises questions about the elements of which it is composed, about the objectives it pursues, about the constraints that affect it, about the tools that it uses to shape places, spaces, buildings. The next Architecture Exhibition will be characterized by the emphasis on a series of relationships that connect great architects and younger generations that refer to them. This Exhibition will represent a major opportunity to bring both the general public and the world of architecture up to date. This is also why it has already begun to organize the program involving Universities from all around the world, titled Biennale Sessions, successfully tested during the last edition of the Exhibition.”

The 13th International Architecture Exhibition of the Biennale di Venezia will also present, as is traditional, the National Participations with their own exhibitions in the Pavilions at the Giardini and at the Arsenale, and in the historic city centre of Venice.

This edition will also include selected Collateral Events, presented by international entities and institutions, which will present their exhibitions and initiatives in Venice concurrently with the 13th Exhibition.

A curving chasm slices off the corner of this showroom building in western Tokyo to create a passageway to its entrance.

Completed by Japanese architects Tsutomu Hasegawa of Be-Fun Design and Takato Tamagami in 2008, the five-storey-high concrete block contains galleries and a workplace for textile company Sunwell.

Glass bridges cross the narrow, timber-lined alleyway on the three upper levels, leading to small triangular meeting rooms.

On the ground floor, a staircase leads down to a basement with high ceilings, where the company host events.

This is the second product showroom we’ve featured on Dezeen this month – see our recent story about a timber showroom concealed behind gauzy black curtains.

Photography is by Masaya Yoshimura.

Here’s some more text from Takato Tamagami:

Sunwell Muse Kita-sando

This is a building of a textile planning and trading company which handles the entire process from the production to retail.

The site is well located on the corner plot near the fashionable city “Harajuku”.

The client had been focusing on female apparel business, so the concept of our building design which is a metaphor of female beauty was suitable for them to put across their corporate identity.

The components that characterises this architecture are the two curved surface walls which dominate the entire space.

These two walls form a shortcut path which connects the roads in front of each side of the corner plot.

This path which looks like a narrow alley or the bottom of a ravine leads visitors inside the building, to the event hall in the basement and the showrooms on the first and second floors.

The curves used in the elevation surfaces on the north side and the east side represent those of a female body.

The graceful curved surface walls were created by connecting the curves with a straight line.

These curved walls are used as a motif of this architecture, and you can see them not only in the façade but also in the internal spaces on each floor.

Use: show room, event hall, office
Client: Sunwell Group

Architect: Takatotamagami Architectural Design/Takato Tamagami + Be-Fun Design/Tsutomu Hasegawa
Location: Sendagaya, Shibuya-Ku, Tokyo, Japan

Date of completion: 29th, February, 2008
Structure: reinforced concrete structure + steel structure

Exterior wall materials: custom-made stucco/ timber pine natural resin varnish finish
Roof materials: seat waterproofing

Interior wall materials: concrete finish/ timber pine natural resin varnish finish / plasterboard EP
Interior floor materials: calcium silicate board/ cement plastering

Building area: 221m2
Total floor area: 992m2

Sometimes the old adage of no news being good news couldn’t be more true, particularly when it comes to the business of building. The American Institute of Architects have released their monthly Architecture Billings Index and it hasn’t made a budge, neither up or down by even a single decimal. One could easily consider this a good sign, considering its predilection over the past couple of years to swing wildly in both directions, and that last month it had ended in the positive. And so the Index remains, stationary at 52 (anything above 50 indicates an increase in billings and a general sense of how well the industry is fairing). However, per usual, here’s the AIA’s main man of math cautiously reminding us that that other old adage, “history repeats itself,” has also been known to be true from time to time as well:

“We saw nearly identical conditions in November and December of 2010 only to see momentum sputter and billings fall into negative territory as we moved through 2011, so it’s too early to be sure that we are in a full recovery mode,” said AIA Chief Economist, Kermit Baker, PhD, Hon. AIA. “Nevertheless, this is very good news for the design and construction industry and it’s entirely possible conditions will slowly continue to improve as the year progresses.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The asymmetric timber roof of this distillery by architects Hammerschmid, Pachl, Seebacher rises up amongst the trees of a valley in Upper Austria.

The distillery’s entire exterior is clad with nothing but roughly sawn, untreated timber, which was milled locally.

The four-storey building nestles against the steep hillside and has its entrance on the second storey.

A bar is located on the top floor and leads out onto a secluded terrace.

We’ve never featured a distillery on Dezeen before, but we have featured a few wineries – see them all here.

Photography is by Dietmar Hammerschmid.

Here’s a few more words from the architects:

The building is situated in the north of Austria, in the middle of an isolated narrow valley.

The Shape of the ground plan is influenced by the regional building regulations and the existing slope.

Moreover the design follows natural limitation given by the adjacent river.

The main idea of the project is to create one homogeneous sculpture for both distillery and living areas, opposing the existing building in an abstract way.

According to the characteristics of landscape the roof of the building is coated by facade material, using untreated rough sawn regional wood.

Innsbruck architect Daniel Fügenschuh has completed a concrete and glass extension to a school at a former monastery in Rattenberg, Tyrol.

The three-storey-high rectangular block provides new classrooms that can also be used for after-school activities, as well as a school dining room.

A large copper-framed window is the only embellishment to the street facade and frames a view out from the front of the dining room, while angled skylights bring natural light into classrooms on the top floor.

A glazed lobby connects the extension to the existing building and a first floor mezzanine provides a viewing platform into the adjacent gym block.

We’ve got a few interesting schools in the Dezeen archive – see them all here, including one outside Paris with walls, ceilings and details picked out in bright orange.

Photography is by Christian Flatscher.

Here’s a little more explanation from Büro Fügenschuh:

Architekt Daniel Fügenschuh ZT GmbH
Hauptschule Rattenberg

A 15th century monastery in Rattenberg, Tyrol was first transformed to a secondary school with a new gym extension in the early 1970ies.

To meet today’s social needs and pedagogic standards a new school extension became necessary so pupils can stay after school and get lunch.

Open plan zones will free up space to allow for alternative teaching methods.

With a modern approach of protecting architectural heritage the building opens up to the historic centre re-defining the importance of the school in the urban context of Rattenberg.

Site: Rattenberg, Österreich

Architect: Daniel Fügenschuh

Competition: 1. Platz

Client: Rattenberger Immobilien GmbH

Mechanical engineer: TAP

Structural engineer: INGENA

Completion: 2011

Floor space: 250 m²