Architecture Biennale

Art exhibitions have started transgressing from ‘white cube’ spaces to ‘alternative spaces’. Biennale, an event is aiming at bringing the art in conversations with the city and people. With the idea of making art more accessible to people, it scouts for spaces and tries to find a way to fit into the public realm and activate it. Art uses the biennale as a medium to communicate with the people by moving into the city fabric, by which it makes direct conversations with the city.

Further carrying the idea of biennale which entails happening progressively in the future in terms of expansions of the existing ones or emerging ones, it seems to happen more in a public realm like streets and open spaces and with the ideas of reusing the building infrastructure as an active generator for the Biennale. The biennale sets out as a tool of transformation of these diverse characters of buildings and spaces in the city. It is giving a new life back to these unused structures for temporary use. Art exhibitions happening in these existing buildings, holding the historical significance ties back to its history-making the biennale very contextual.

Biennale, happening in these diverse locations in the city creates a transformation pattern at the city level. This seems to be a way in which future exhibitions will take place, which is unbounded to the set of spaces. It is therefore important to see that if we are poised at this threshold, that we have these biennales happening and more likely to occur in the future, it is therefore relevant to understand biennales in the Indian context and specifically in terms of transformations and factors that inform these transformations.

In this sort of a context where art is moving into the public realm and alternate spaces, how transformations due to the biennale respond to the city?

Il volume su Zissis Kotionis, architetto e docente universitario greco, tenta di indagare l'estesa ed eterogenea opera dell'architetto e dell'artista, la doppia descrizione con cui Kotionis si presenta, che include installazioni, performance, design, mappe, architetture, video e libri. Il catalogo delle opere incluso in questo libro ordina il lavoro di Kotionis dai progetti di più piccole dimensioni a quelli di dimensioni maggiori, mettendo in evidenza figure e metodologie che si ripetono e che sono declinate a scale diverse. La costanza della ricerca sul senso del luogo e dell'abitare, sulla questione della singolarità e della moltitudine, sul rapporto tra spazio-corpo-costruzione e sulla tecnica dell'assemblaggio come metodologia progettuale, temi che troviamo intrecciati nelle opere qui presentate, permette a Kotionis di formulare diverse ipo­tesi circa le possibilità di abitare il mondo partendo dal riconoscimento delle questioni fondamentali dell'esistenza dell'uomo sulla Terra.

This paper is a response to a call for positions launched by the 2012 Architecture Biennale director David Chipperfield. A selected group of architects and critics were invited to address the Biennale’s theme of “Common Ground” in architecture.  ‘A Conversation of Many’ proposes a critical view of architecture as an intrinsically multi-disciplinary practice, whose project can take many different forms and even, occasionally and polemically, no form at all.  Through a selection of critical break-point cases that span across times and geographies, the essay proposes a practice of architecture which remains open (renegotiable), multiple (its many forms and different solutions) and always relational (its many agents). Ultimately architecture is proposed as a critical and intellectual practice in the making of the material environment, which retains its specificity even (and especially) in its involvement with other disciplines and in complex contexts of operation.
The paper challenges several suppositions regarding Architecture, its role and agency. Architecture is considered as intrinsic to socio-political upheaval, as an actor rather than a barometer, as self-reflective (and therefore both autonomous from and dependent on other disciplines), and as a propositional force for the (urban) environment. Ultimately, the paper advocates the specificity of architecture, even (and especially) in its involvement with other disciplines and complex contexts of operation. Contents:  ‘Architecture is not late’: political regimes, ideologies and financial systems collapse, while architecture is always late in catching up with the reality in which it operates. But is it?  ‘Architecture thinks’: since the origin of western culture, architecture and philosophy have been associated in a system of mutual references.  ‘Architecture trans-forms’: recent global events are showing us that architecture is not the seismograph that signals and records external upheavals; architecture is deeply involved with processes of social, political, cultural and financial change.  ‘Architecture changes’: collaborative and transformative, architecture is ‘provisionally decisive’, as it again and again proposes critical solutions.  ‘Architecture is silent’.  ‘Architecture laughs’.