Let's continue the architectural thread that started yesterday by looking at an art room with quite a few architecture connections in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini at the 55th International Venice Art Biennale. The central space of the room on the left side of the pavilion entrance is occupied by 387 model buildings, the unique creations of an unassuming Austrian insurance clerk from Vienna named Peter Fritz.
The toy-size model houses were spotted in 1993 in a junk shop by artist Oliver Croy and architecture critic Oliver Elser. The houses seemed to be in a pretty good condition since they were each wrapped in a garbage bag, but Croy and Elser didn't find many information about their creator who had turned his passion into an encyclopedic way to classify different architectural styles. The buildings on display here include indeed farmhouses, churches, family homes, villas, gas stations and even fashion houses (spot it in one of the pictures).
Fritz made the toy-size models using basic materials such as cardboard, wood, matchboxes, wallpaper scraps, adhesive foil and magazine pages. Though most models were the result of Fritz's fantasy, quite a few of them could have actually been built as the houses look almost real, lifted from the urban landscape of a calm and quiet town.
The houses are also testament to a personal passion: Fritz recreated a miniature world in which his imagination reigned supreme, and while his hobby was the proof of his will to escape from the reality, it also proved he was pretty happy with the everyday since the homes he built were ingenious examples of suburban architectures and didn't have anything extravagant about them.
The background to Fritz's urban landscape is a mixed media work entitled “9-11-01” by Jack Whitten. The African-American artist first started working on abstract compositions in the '60s, when he moved to New York and met Willem De Kooning and Franz Union.
In 1974 a grant from the Xerox Corporation allowed him to use large scale printers and work with the company's engineers and he soon started experimenting with other materials including Afro combs and squeegees. Whitten developed in the '90s another technique, arranging acrylic paint into small tiles and applying them to his canvases.
This technique allowed him to recreate in his works mosaic-like architectural decorations. Whitten often conceives his works as memorials for deceased friends, family members or personal heroes. His work “9-11-01” (2006) is a collage of his trademark mosaic tesserae, mixed with crushed bones, blood, glass, ash, lacquered magazines and bits and pieces of newspapers, and represents the artist's vision of the September 11 attacks that he witnessed from his studio in Lower Manhattan.
In this case the architectural connection stands in the pyramid that calls to mind memorial architecture, but it is also conceived as a reference to the pyramid on the US one-dollar bill.
Fritz employed materials to create a very ordered vision of everyday life; in Whitten's case materials are assembled and accumulated together to hint at an almost archaeological stratification occurred after the attacks in which many people lost their lives.
Drawings of fantastic towers that at times call to mind the sets for Metropolis by designers Erich Kettelhut and Otto Hunte, are on display on another wall in the same room. They were made by Achilles G. Rizzoli (1896-1981).
Born to Swiss immigrant parents, Rizzoli grew up in a rural area outside San Francisco. He graduated from the Polytechnical College of Engineering in Oakland in 1915, the same year of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, that also featured a 435-foot-tall “Tower of Jewels” covered in tens of thousands of cut-glass gems.
Influenced by this event Rizzoli started designing fantastic buildings that mixed different styles together. The artist worked as an architectural draftsman by day and, once home in the evening, he would work on his intricate drawings of towers, temples and monuments.
His buildings were extremely detailed combinations of Art Deco and neo-Gothic among the other architectural styles, in which he infused a healthy dose of witticism. The artist also started making plans for a utopian exhibition of buildings dubbed YTTE (Yield To Total Elation).
In some cases his buildings were dedicated to abstract notions such as happiness or euthanasia (see “The Shaft of Ascension”); in others they were transfigurations of people he knew: "The Kathedral" (1935) was for example an opulent tower in honour of his mother, while friends Mrs Geo Powleson was portrayed as the "Mother Tower of Jewels" (a direct reference to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition) and Margaret E. Griffin like "The Palazzo Pianissimo".
The way Rizzoli used the architectural vocabulary to represent people clearly shows he had a talent for injecting humour and irony into his architectural sketches.
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