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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Courtesy of The Strong, Rochester, New York

Courtesy of The Strong, Rochester, New York

This will be difficult for Generation Xbox to comprehend, but it used to be that when kids wanted to get their game on, they had to amass a bunch of quarters and take the subway to a videogame arcade. And arcades used to be something like dive bars for kids—they were always shady, filled with cigarette smoke exhaled by miscreants, and there was always the possibility you’d get your ass kicked or have your jacket forcibly taken from you. Even still, arcades were awesome.

Perhaps the strangest thing compared to today’s sleek gaming system boxes were the huge cabinets games used to be mounted in. They were phone-booth-sized particle board affairs sometimes laminated with fake woodgrain, as if some artisan had carved Ms. Pac-Man out of mahogany. The fact that they were in cabinets had at least one positive long-term effect: Shigeru Miyamoto, game god and Donkey Kong inventor, started out as an industrial designer tasked with creating cabinets for Nintendo.

In any case, we’ve just learned that the International Center for the History of Electronic Games, up in Rochester, New York, has somehow got their hands on what they’re calling the Atari Arcade Design Collection: 250 industrial design drawings of arcade game cabinets dating from 1974 to 1989, in all of their primitive marker-rendering glory.

Courtesy of The Strong, Rochester, New York

The collection provides a rare visual documentation of the thinking behind the design of Atari’s coin-operated games at a time when the arcade was the hub of the video game industry and Atari was the leading producer of arcade games.

According to ICHEG Director Jon-Paul Dyson, “These drawings offer a rare look into how designers created Atari’s iconic arcade cabinets. Researchers will find new information about the development of these games, and the vivid visuals of these designs give them great potential for public exhibit displays.”

Courtesy of The Strong, Rochester, New York

Speaking of which, when will they be displayed? We contacted ICHEG and they’re saying possibly this summer, though no hard date has been set. Sadly all we’ve been given are the paltry teaser images here, which weren’t even scanned, but appear to be cell phone pics of drawings laid on a table. Shocking, isn’t it, to see how these primitive marker drawings created a generation of dreams?

Courtesy of The Strong, Rochester, New York

Rochester’s a good six hours away from NYC, but if ICHEG posts some more compelling teaser images, I’d consider taking the trip up there. I’d like to see the drawings displayed in a gallery populated by civilized adults, where I could walk in wearing whatever jacket I wanted and not have to worry about walking back out in a T-shirt and with a fresh black eye.

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We’re excited to check out our friend Rob Walker‘s latest endeavor, an exhibition at non-profit NYC gallery Apex Art. As Real As It Gets is an ‘exploration of “imaginary brands and fictional products,’ it includes works (including new commissions) by Shawn Wolfe, Conrad Bakker, Dana Wyse, Kelli Anderson, Beach Packaging Design, Ryan Watkins-Hughes, Steven M. Johnson, and the U.S. Government Accountability Office, among others.” The longtime culture/design critic is perhaps best known as a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, and Walker has continued to explore consumer culture with the penetrating insight of a modern anthropologist and sometime design observer since he penned “Buying In.” This summer saw the publication of “Significant Objects,” an anthology of stories from a project of the same name; As Real As It Gets is also an exercise in creating meaning, except with the opposite approach: starting with a fiction to arrive at a final product.

Walker writes:

Tell me about yourself, and you might mention where you’re from, the music you prefer, perhaps a favorite writer or filmmaker or artist, possibly even the sports teams you root for. But I doubt you’ll mention brands or products. That would seem shallow, right? There’s just something illegitimate about openly admitting that brands and products can function as cultural material, relevant to identity and expression. It’s as if we would prefer this weren’t true…

The underlying discomfort is something I’ve noted over many years spent writing about brands and products. One reader comment clarifies the dilemma. In a column about products and companies that exist only in the fictional worlds of books and movies, I categorized such things as “imaginary brands.” Harrumph to that, this reader replied: All brands are imaginary.

I saw his point, but he’d missed mine. The ambiguity in the relationship between our selves and the brand-soaked world we navigate is exactly what’s worth taking seriously, not waving away. When such consideration is filtered through an open and unpredictable mind, anything seems possible (even the wildly implausible). Willfully imaginary brands and products can be considered as a medium, expressive of joy, fear, humor, unease, ambivalence—very real stuff, in other words.

Clockwise from top left: Shawn Wolfe – “Gross National Products Presents” (detail); The Marianas – Installation view of “Montalvo Historical Fabrications & Souvenirs”; Conrad Bakker – “UNTITLED PRODUCT DISTRIBUTION NETWORK”; Ryan Watkins-Hughes – Installation view of Shopdropping Project

The works in the diverse group exhibition—handpicked by Walker—collectively address this issue, from culturejamming projects such as ‘product displacement’ and ‘shopdropping’ to what Bruce Sterling deemed ‘design fiction.’ “Taken together, this collection of imaginary brands and fictional products is not about brands and products at all. In this show, the marketplace is the medium.”

The exhibition opens at the Tribeca gallery tomorrow evening, Thursday, November 15, with two performances during the run of the show: a “Speculative Sound Performance” by Disquiet Junto collective on Tuesday, November 27, and a MakerBot demo with artist Shawn Wolfe, who will be reissuing his functionless “RemoverInstaller” for one night only. (For more on Walker, Imprint Culture Lab recently interviewed him on the occasion of the exhibition.)

As Real As It Gets
Organized by Rob Walker
Apex Art
291 Church Street
New York, NY 10013
November 16 – December 22, 2012
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 15, 6–8PM

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We offered a few glimpses of the YUNG HO CHANG + FCJZ: MATERIAL-ISM, currently on view at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, in our Best of Beijing Design Week photo gallery, but unfortunately it was a bit too dusty during the press preview to properly revel in what is easily one of the most interesting exhibition designs that I’ve seen lately. Of course, this should come as no surprise given the content of the exhibition, a retrospective of the title architect and his studio, Feichang Jianzhu (FCJZ):

Spanning the last 30 years, YUNG HO CHANG + FCJZ: MATERIAL-ISM explores FCJZ’s experiments in architecture, design, planning and art together with a detailed study into the different aspects of Yung Ho Chang’s practice, such as inhabitation, construction methods, urbanism, tradition, perception, and culture. Through these works, the exhibition not only considers the buildings people inhabit and the cities they constitute but also the importance of design in everyday urban life and the specific predicament of people, in the context of the last three decades of unprecedented growth in China.

UCCA Director Philip Tinari praised Chang’s “witty, thoughtful and universal design solutions inspired by distinctly Chinese problems and concepts,” noting that he is “considered the father of contemporary Chinese architecture.” He was among the first to leave the mainland to study in the States (Berkeley ’84), where he lived and worked for over a decade before returning to his hometown Beijing in 1992.

Known as both the first architect to set up an independent atelier in China and the first Chinese national to head a major department of architecture in an international university—having served as dean of architecture at MIT 2003–2009—Chang has inspired a wide range of followers and mentored a new generation of talent.

As he recently related in Time Out Beijing, Chang fondly recalled the traditional courtyard houses hutong of his youth… even as witnessed the radical reinvention of the ancient capital over the course of two decades, as upwards of 88% of the iconic alleyways were bulldozed (according to UNESCO) in favor of the soulless highrises that dominate Beijing’s cityscape today.

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KISD invites you to expose your cultural filter by seeing how design students bridge the gap between the many cultures and mind sets they experience d..