Irenebrination: Notes on Architecture, Art, Fashion, Fashion Law, Science & Technology

Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Milano Again...and Again: Rosie Assoulin Resort 2019

Memphis Milano has been a constant fixation of many fashion and accessories designers in the last seven years or so: as you may rmember, Bill Gaytten took inspiration for Dior's Autumn/Winter 2011-12 Haute Couture collection from the design movement.

The thread continued in Sergio Rossi's Spring/Summer 2013 collection and later on took a new incarnation with Prada's A/W 2015 designs, with their pastel shades that looked entirely lifted from Michele De Lucchi's Girmi prototypes.

In more recent years the combination of colours of De Lucchi's interior design pieces reappeared in Christian Louboutin's sandals while Nathalie du Pasquier's drawings provided the main inspiration for Valentino's A/W 17 collection.  

In other cases, rather than inspiring the textures and print clashes in the actual garments, the pieces of furniture by the designers behind the Memphis Milano movement became decorative elements on the runway.

In 2015 Arthur Arbesser showcased indeed his Resort 2016 collection at the Stazione Leopolda in Florence and displayed on the runway iconic pieces, such as the 1981 "Suvretta" bookcase by Ettore Sottsass.

The idea returned in the presentation for Rosie Assoulin's S/S and Resort 2019 collections: a few Memphis Milano pieces were indeed used as background decoration, among them Masanori Umeda's 1981 wooden boxing ring-shaped bed; Peter Shire's "Peninsula" desk, accessorised with Ettore Sottsass's "Bay Lamp" and matched with George Sowden's "Palace Chair". 

The pieces were part of "Raquel’s Dream House", an installation of Memphis designs by Raquel Cayre, who curates the tribute Instagram account @ettoresottsass (despite being full of visually striking images, you wished that Cayre had actually opted for an account name that somehow sounded less like an appropriation of Sottsass' identity and more like a tribute...).

The Memphis Milano moods were clear in the bicolored dresses, zebra printed shoes and summer dresses and light coats decorated with cheerful handpainted watercolour stripes, or in the separates embellished with hundreds of coloured beads that seemed to form a visual morse code. Another reference could maybe be tracked in the straw bags dipped in silicone and transformed into colourful vases, maybe to imitate the famous surfaces created by Abet Laminati for the Memphis Milano group. 

The collections also included desirable dresses and tops in silk damask, yet other garments with avant-garde silhouettes such as peplum bustiers matched with striped dresses could have been edited out of the collection as too similar to other quirky and supposedly conceptual modern designs out there that end up looking awkward on real women (yes, blame JW Anderson...). 

Though the collections showed real attention to details and a passion for textiles unseen in other contemporary (and more celebrated) designers, they were a missed occasion as Assoulin may have moved from colours and experiments with different materials of the design group for more exciting pieces, especially for what regarded the accessories.

Using the iconic Memphis Milano furniture as background decor proved that we're still stuck inside of mobile with the Memphis Milano again, to rephrase the famous Bob Dylan song that inspired the design group. In a nutshell, it looks like we may still have to wait before seeing in the fashion realm a proper affordable and exciting project with a Memphis Milano designer or collaborator. Abet Laminati jewellery anybody?

The Earth as Client: VTN Architects' "Bamboo Stalactite" @ The 16th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice

Leading architectural Vietnamese practice VTN Architects (Vo Trong Nghia Architects) has been experimenting with natural and local materials since it was founded in 2006.

The practice has one main principle - working on each project as if the Earth had commissioned it, as if our precious planet was the client. To this aim founder Vo Trong Nghia and his collaborators have developed a series of aims and objectives: integrating trees into each piece of architecture they create as they have a positive effect on human beings; employing eco-friendly materials and traditional skills and making architecture for everybody and not just for a rich minority. Collaborating with Wind and Water House JSC, a construction company specializing in green buildings construction, VTN designed and built a series of sustainable structures in Vietnam.

One of VTN's structures was transported from Vietnam to Venice for the 16th International Architecture Exhibition. "Bamboo Stalactite" was assembled together with Vietnamese and Italian artchitects and craftsmen on the docks overlooking the water outside the Arsenale area. The structure combines modular systems and human craftsmanship and it is designed to be easily assembled and dismantled.

The name of the structure has got a particular meaning: the word stalactite hints indeed at the fact that the shape of the structure looks as if it were hanging from the sky, and touches the ground at points so as not to fly away.

The architectural practice behind this project has been working a lot with different natural materials and with bamboo in particular, conceived as an alternative to concrete, steel and wood.

Vo Trong Nghia actually calls bamboo - a lightweight material with high tensile strength, good bending quality (the way the material is worked, bent and tied generates strength, so that the structure only needs to be anchored), rapid growth rate and global availability - "the green steel of the 21st century" and the preliminary drawings for "Bamboo Stalactite" look indeed like steel reinforcement drawings for a concrete tensile roof.

Like other projects at this year's Venice Biennale, such as Andramatin's, "Bamboo Stalactite" integrates inexpensive, local materials and traditional skills with contemporary aesthetics and modern methodologies and offers a space where visitors can rest, relax, meet or debate about architecture, while kids can play in a stage-like industrial setting.

The structure is a bit reminiscent of the Ting Xi Bamboo Restaurant, a Xiamen-based building designed by VTN (while the shadows the woven bamboo sticks cast on the ground call to mind the intricate motifs of Burano lace, a great link with the local tradition...) and makes you think a lot about other purposes for these installations. 

It would be intriguing for example to see if bamboo could be used to create temporary sets for fashion runways. In March Chanel was criticised for using felled century-old oaks and poplar trees from a wood (the fashion house claimed the trees were not 100 years old and promised to replant 100 new oak trees in the heart of the same forest...) to recreate inside Paris' Grand Palais a magic autumnal setting for its A/W 2018 runway show. It would be great if ethical and responsible fashion extended also to runway sets, with temporary structures like the ones by VTN Architects providing innovative decor, while giving impenitent fashionistas the chance to ponder more about the possibilities that natural materials can offer us.

Elevated Woven Architectures: Andramatin @The 16th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice

Let's continue the woven architecture thread that started yesterday with a brief focus on another project on display in the Arsenale spaces at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice. The project in question consists in a natural woven wicker structure by Andramatin, a practice founded by Isandra Matin Ahmad, inspired by traditional building forms employed in Indonesia.

Visitors can actually enter the structure and wander around it: a staircase leads to the top of the small tower-like construction and, as they climb it, they will discover models of traditional houses in Indonesia that show imagination and invention.

In the Biennale installation Andramatin explores indeed a section of the Indonesian archipelago, from Sabang to Merauke: thousands of islands rise up out of the sea along these places positioned 6 degrees and 8 degrees below the Equator. These places also imply diverse ethnicities, natural treasures, histories, cultures and religious beliefs, but one shared commong design intention - surviving tropical climate.

Though the models showcase different types of houses designed and built following various architectural languages, elevation remains a constant feature. 

Some houses are built on top of the ground, with dried grass as flooring; others are raised a few steps above the ground. In many regions houses are raised and supported by pilotis, a practice inspired by the spiritual beliefs of the locals that also offers a solution to floods and to the attacks of wild animals. The spaces below the houses (that can rise as high as 10 metres above the ground) can be used to house livestock or store foods. 

Over 55% of the local population in Indonesia live in urban areas, but traditional constructions built with available materials and employing local techniques have so far offered interesting building methods and the temporary structure in the Arsenale is inspired by such techniques.

The structure offers an interaction with nature as the material employed to make it is natural wicker, woven in a very special way so that the surface of the building seems to create three-dimensional squarish motifs.

While the outer surface is fascinating, the most interesting thing remains the fact that you can climb inside it and discover in this tower-like configuration other buildings that show strong links between architecture and natural elements such as the ground, the sky and the breeze. The models of houses featured in the building seem to have grown almost naturally, they look as if they had developed with the people who inhabit them.

The house that Andramatin built becomes therefore a platform combining contemporary crafts and modernity, versatility and traditions, material and technical skills with nature.

Last but not least, the project - that got a special mention at this year's biennale with the motivation "for a sensitive installation that provides a framework to reflect on the material and form of traditional vernacular structures" - invites visitors to consider how local traditions can become global and wonder if it is possible to apply the architectural language of a region to another country, using materials that are readily available in one place and making nature respond to and interact with them. The theme of elevation offers a different perspective and spatial experience to visitors, using the Indonesian architectural vernacular to represent a path to global freespace.

Geometrically Inspired Fiber Canopies: "Weaving Architecture" by Benedetta Tagliabue - Miralles Tagliabue EMBT @ The 16th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice

In other editions of the Venice Architecture Biennale there were definitely more projects that tackled the intersection between architecture and other disciplines, including fashion and textiles in particular.

At the 16th International Architecture Exhibition there are fewer ones and among them there's Benedetta Tagliabue-Miralles Tagliabue EMBT's "Weaving Architecture" installation that represents a fragment of their project for the Clichy-Montfermeil metro station.

The project for the wicker Spanish Pavilion at Shanghai Expo 2010 event was the starting point for other projects by this architecture practice such as this one for the station (part of the Grand Paris Express, Europe's largest infrastructure and development project with 200 km of automatic metro lines and 68 new stations) located at the border of two suburb small towns, Clichy-sous-Bois and Montfermeil (in the outskirts of Paris).

The architectural practice hopes to transform this grey and abandoned place into a vivid and colorful square where the shapes of the pergola roofs, based on traditional decorative geometrical motives from Africa combined with the colours of local graffiti, cover the area with a canopy made with wood and fibers, a delicate and light yet solid and resistant material once tightly woven.

Weaving represents a metaphor for the architects behind this project - it is a physical act involving tangible fibers, but it also refers to something invisible, that is the power of weaving people together, inviting to social inclusion.

Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, this year's curators at the Biennale, also point out that the suspended woven canopy of wood and fibers, is reminiscent in their view of the poem "Psalm" by Wislawa Szymborska.

Written in 1976, the poem is very apt for our times, as it states "How leaky are all the borders, we draw around our separate nations! How many clouds cross these boundaries daily, without even paying the toll!"

While the canopy is supposed to create a shelter its fragmented configuration hints indeed at mobility and liquid borders, a relevant theme in Europe where the debate about migrants and borders is verging on hostility rather than openness.

In Venice the practice has recreated sections of the canopy that will provide shade and protection in the metro station, offering a semi-open space for communal activities.

A series of large cushions with digitally printed images showing the renderings for the project and the background research behind it, creates a space where visitors can relax and think about the power of weaving and handcrafts in modern architecture.

Fashion Obituary: Kate Spade, Quintessential American Woman & Entrepreneur (1962-2018)

The fashion industry was shocked when yesterday it was announced that designer Kate Spade, 55, was found hanged in her apartment at 850 Park Avenue, New York.

Born Katherine Noel Brosnahan in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1962, she attended the University of Kansas and then transferred to Arizona State University, graduating with a degree in journalism in 1985.

She started working in the accessories department of Mademoiselle in Manhattan and, in the early '90s, she launched her brand together with Andy Spade, who later on became her husband.

The company mainly produced affordable clothes and accessories, such as her popular nylon bags, but soon expanded to other categories including stationery, eyewear and fragrances. Spade favoured cheerful and playful pieces that people enjoyed for their functionality and practicality.

The first boutique opened in 1996 and the company expanded to home products in 2004.

Before that, though, in 1999, Neiman Marcus Group had purchased 56% of the Kate Spade brand and, in 2006, it acquired the remaining 44%. The group then sold the Kate Spade label for $124 million to Liz Claiborne Inc. and Spade stepped away from her company in 2007, focusing on being a full-time mother.

She launched a new collection - called Frances Valentine - of footwear and accessories in 2016. In the meantime last year, after rebranding as Kate Spade & Co, Claiborne sold the brand to Tapestry (owner of Coach and Stuart Weitzman) for $2.4billion.

The day before Spade's untimely death, The Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) gathered in Brooklyn for its annual awards.

In 1996, the Council awarded Spade the "America's New Fashion Talent in Accessories" award, followed two years later by the prize for "Best Accessory Designer of the Year". Spade was a member of the CFDA, but did not attend this year's ceremony.

As the news of her death arrived, CFDA chairman Diane von Furstenberg issued the following statement: "The CFDA is devastated to hear the news of our friend, colleague, and CFDA member Kate Spade's tragic passing. She was a great talent who had an immeasurable impact on American fashion and the way the world viewed American accessories. We want to honor her life and her major contribution to the fashion business and express our most sincere condolences to the family."

Kate Spade New York, now owned by Tapestry Inc., stated on the social media: "Kate Spade, the visionary founder of our brand, has passed. Our thoughts are with her family at this incredibly heartbreaking time. We honor all the beauty she brought into the world."

While in some reports it was stated that Spade was depressed about marital and money problems, relatives and her sister in particular claimed instead she was battling mental illness and she suffered from bipolar disorder. According to her sister she kept on postponing going into treatment as she thought it would have hurt the image of her brand, yet her husband highlighted in a statement today that the designer suffered from depression and anxiety and was "actively seeking help".  

Spade's story raises new concerns about mental illnesses in connection with the fashion industry: she is indeed the third high-profile suicide in the fashion industry in the last eight years and follows Alexander McQueen's and L'Wren Scott's tragic deaths in 2010 and 2014. Somehow, though different in her inspirations and designs from McQueen's, her death seems prompted by similar reasons: the British designer couldn't reconcile the most commercial aspects of the fashion industry with his strong fantastic visions; if, as her sister claims she suffered from bipolar disorder, Spade couldn't reconcile her personal condition with the happy-go-lucky image of her brand. 

Spade, who is also the aunt of Rachel Brosnahan, star of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, is survived by her husband Andy, brother of actor David Spade, and daughter, Frances, 13.

No Matter Who Wins Graduate Fashion Week, From Embossed PVC to Biology-Inspired Textiles, Edinburgh College of Art Has Already Stolen the Scene

There are quite a few exciting finalists in the various categories of the current edition of London's Graduate Fashion Week (from 3rd to 6th June), yet there is an institution that has already won - Edinburgh College of Art (ECA). For years the Scottish college has presented outstanding sell-out shows with young graduates showcasing striking collections.

Mal Burkinshaw, ECA Fashion Programme Director, recently stated on the college's site: "Our graduating year have developed imaginative and innovative concepts, which I am sure will captivate audiences." They surely did and yesterday's runway didn't disappoint, closing with two strong contenders - Maddy Stringer and Aurélie Fontan.

Fashion fans familiar with the GFW 2018 advertising campaign will definitely remember Stringer's designs as her ample and bold red coat was featured in one of the ads, modelled by stunning Char Ellesse.

Stringer designed a collection featuring a series of pieces characterised by architectural shapes: her coats are made with red plastic that looks like blood, but decorated with embossed motifs that call to mind the swirly decors of carpets.

The final effect is Comme des Garçons' all red Spring/Summer 2015 collection meets Nicolas Roeg's Venetian horror Don't Look Now meets The Handmaid's Tale with an interior design twist (see also the embossed motif of chairs on her metallic blue leather trousers).

Stringer's main inspirations for these visually striking PVC pieces were actually her childhood dolls' house and hotel soap packets.

French student Aurélie Fontan has instead been focusing on an intense exploration of the boundaries between art, fashion and science.

A pioneer in biodesign, Fontan's previous projects focused on making textiles from fungi and included workshops at the ASCUS lab at Edinburgh's Summerhall to create slime molds, a type of free living single celled organisms that she then used as the basis for the design of a coat.

In her graduate collection she tried to present alternatives to fast fashion and waste/plastics coming up with monumental black and bronze ensembles made with a 100% biodegradable grown kombucha textile covered with a non plastic-based coating and seamed with soluble cable ties.

Entitled "Tensegrity", a term that describes complex forms that use simple elements held in balance by opposing forces, and inspired by the repetitive building patterns and '60s Parisian suburban architecture by Ricardo Bofill, the ecofriendly collection also included recycled cork and rubber and upcycled carpet underlay.

ECA doesn't seem to be featured in many of the supposedly "Best Design School" charts of the sort that, rather than producing an interesting critical debate about education, only end up generating hate among universities and colleges, but its students keep on presenting coherent, outstanding and well-researched collections, accompanied by Instagram feeds focused on their textile work.

Students from ECA appear as finalists in different categories at the current edition of GFW, while both Stringer and Fontain are among the finalists of the "Best of GFW18 Show" Award. 

In a nutshell, as highlighted in previous posts, it looks like the less celebrated universities and colleges out there may be the ones achieving better results and forming more interesting graduates.

So, if you are looking for a university course in fashion and design, you may want to consider leaving behind fancy institutions with cool reputations, and opt for smaller ones where you may be able to use your time to develop personal and consistent researches to genuinely help creating a more exciting and renewable fashion industry.   

Between The Bauhaus and Jean Tinguely (and with a Bruno Munari Twist): Atelier Riccardo Blumer @ The 16th International Architecture Exhibition, Venicen

Architect and professor Riccardo Blumer is known for being also an an inventor and creator of machines. In his practice Blumer often looks at architecture and geometry in connection with the human body, even though in more recent years he has developed a fascinating discourse focused on machines and automatic movement and the way they can influence atchitecture.

His teaching practice promotes experimental interventions with the contamination of other technical disciplines aimed at sparking a dialogue about the evolution of architecture. Mechanical pieces, pulleys, motors and sensors usually move in Blumer's installations with precise repetitive rhythm, creating mesmerising symphonies of sounds, while prompting viewers to think about their uselessness and the purpose of architecture. 

Quite often in previous installations Blumer and his students looked at architectural themes and features such as walls and doors, open spaces and restrictive borders, trying to create interferences inside them using the human body and technology.

Among Blumer's most famous installations there is one that captivated the attention of Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, the curators of the 16th International Architecture Biennale.

Entitled "La Gabbia" (The Cage) it consisted in a series of 30-metre-long bird wood cages made by Blumer's students and integrating a gap so that each bird could connect with its neighbour. Birds could fly the full length of the interconnected cages that turned into street terraces for birds.

Farrell and McNamara state in the notes accompanying the various installations at the Biennale that Blumer reminds them of the Bauhaus' experimentations and of Jean Tinguely's mechanical sculptures. Yet, in some cases, Blumer seems to be a modern Bruno Munari-like figure, promoting a playful approach to things to make you actually think, as proved also by two installations created by his students included in the Arsenale section of the Venice Biennale - "Wall" by Lorela Arapi, Stefano Clerici and Andrea Cappellaro, and "Space" by Georgios Voutsis.

The former is a s a walkable machine that tackles a series of themes such as gravity, light, liquid and movement: the machine continually builds minimal thin surfaces composed of water and soap, only the reflection of light makes the liquid walls visible, but they only last a few seconds. The walls hardly exist and, when they appear, they are only temporary and ephemeral.

"Space" generates instead through genetic algorithms based on geometric rules and architectural typologies infinite spatial variations modifying the height of the 121 parallelepipeds that make its orthogonal matrix. 

The two machines point at the extreme conditions of "Freespace", the main theme of this year's biennale, and, though useless, they have the power of capturing the visitors' attention, bewitching them with their evanescent and impermanent mutations.   

The Adaptive Brain of Wetlands: The Swamp School, Pavilion of Lithuania @ The 16th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice

As seen in a previous post the Nordic Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice attempted a dialogue between humankind and nature. Lithuania went for the same aim, albeit in a different format, through a series of projects reunited in its pavilion, installed at the Giardino Bianco Art Space (located between the Arsenale and the Giardini, in Via Giuseppe Garibaldi, 1814, Castello).

Curated by artists Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas, the installation "The Swamp School" moves from two inspirations - the pioneering botanical study of the Aukštumala swamp in Lithuania (1902) by German botanist Carl Albert Weber and the bio-computing visions of British cybernetician Stafford Beer (1962). 

The latter worked on complex models of self-balance within industrial production and conceptually designed the cybernetic factory as a system that was able to adapt to an unknowable and ever-changing environment and that had therefore to be equipped with an adaptive brain gifted with resilience and flexibility. In Beer's cybernetic dream, manmade systems merged with living biological matter, and the swamp represented the driving force in the overall scheme.

Swamps are made of water and land, they could therefore be conceived as the perfect metaphor for the city of Venice, but also for our times and society, in constant change and turmoil. The curators also employ the swamp in a radical way as a place that can prompt us to ponder a bit more about ecosystems reclaiming their spaces and fighting back human interventions. Last but not least, the swamp metaphor is an invitation from the curators to human cohabitation and interaction with other forms of life.  

"Swamps seem to be the opposite of architecture, given that every construction starts from land reclamation," the curators state. "Today, made evident by global environmental disasters, wetlands are physically pushing back on our attempts to industrialize and control them. Instead of fighting our watery neighbors, we must embrace them as a place for future co-habitation. Indeed, swamp turns out to be a perfect milieu, the place, to learn, to understand, and to hear other species, forces and ecosystems that have been silenced and downgraded by us." 

Until the end of the Biennale in November, the Giardino Bianco Art Space will be a laboratory where people can stop and ponder a bit more about the swamp as a liminal space inhabited by rare animals and greenery. 

As the swamp is an ecosystem in constant transformation so the space in the gallery will focus on different aspects: the first aspect explored in May was Swamp Radio, with a series of acoustic space explorations, radio experiments, environmental sound recordings and eco-data sonification. At the end of June the pavilion will instead focus on the theme of Futurity Island and symbio-poetics, that is finding a new ethos of coexistence, a direction that stems from the act of recognising the poetical power of the ecologies surrounding us. The last series of events in September, will engage with Commonism and focus on the speculative forms of citizenship and cohabitation between people, and also between humans and non-human residents. 

An interdisciplinary group of tutors with students from all over the world (the pavilion boasts the support of a series of partners, artists, architects, and institutions including MIT School of Architecture and Planning, MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology and MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology) will shape installations, lectures, field trips and workshops in both the pavilion and in Venice (you can find further information about the program here).

The entrance of the pavilion has got a connection with fashion since it features a row of raincoats created by fashion designer Sandra Straukaite that feature prints of the background research behind the pavilion and that could be interpreted as the uniform of the Swampians, that is explorers and experimenters in new ecosystems (hopefully they will produce some of the raincoats and sell them as well as they look rather intriguing).

The next sections of the pavilion take visitors on a multi-sensory journey with a visit to three olfactory chambers and to an outdoor space where a patch of Lithuanian swamp has been temporarily reinstalled. 

One of the most interesting section remains the journey through the sounds of the wetlands: when the pavilion opened there were also other acoustic explorations going on with Jana Winderen creating live audible soundscapes.

Among the best installations in this section there is one created by artist duo Rasa and Raitis who have worked for several years to explore techno-ecological systems and interspecies communication. Their Biotricity experiments at the new media platform RIXC and Kemeri bog in Latvia sonify and visualise the bacteria electricity generation process, revealing relationships between biological and computing systems.

In Spring 2018, they expanded their research into water reservoirs and marshlands in the greater Boston area, experimenting with field recordings, radio transmission, and biodata sonification.

The duo transposed the Biotricity experiments from marshlands in the Boston area and the bogs of Latvia to the wetlands in Venice, installing in them bacteria batteries and micro radio transmitting devices and connecting them with real-time sonic environment in the exhibition space.

Their installation becomes therefore a space of free exchange between humans and the invisible and inaudible actors of the swamp, proving that, just like the DC Comics humanoid antihero in the comic book created by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson, the swamp breathes, dreams and thinks. 

Breathing with Nature: "Another Generosity", The Nordic Pavilion @ The 16th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice

In the past editions of the Venice Architecture Biennale there have been projects that featured living entities inside a pavilion or that were inspired by biology. The Nordic Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition (on until 25th November) moved along the same lines and came up with a series of breathing units forming the installation "Another Generosity", by Eero Lundén, founder of the Helsinki-based Lundén Architecture Company.

The project looks at the relationship between nature and the built environment, a link already explored in the layout of the Nordic Pavilion, designed by Sverre Fehn in 1962, and integrating three plane trees inside the 446-square metre space.

"Another Generosity" was the result of a joint effort, it was indeed commissioned by the directors of three museums - Juulia Kauste and Reetta Heiskanen from the Museum of Finnish Architecture; Nina Berre from the Norwegian National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design and Kieran Long from ArkDes, the Swedish National Centre for Architecture and Design.

The entire space of the pavilion is filled with giant living pods: these alien pumpkin-shaped creatures, produced by the company Pneumocell, well-known for its inflatable structures, furniture and objects, with the help of BuroHappold Engineering and Aalto University, are attached to the ceiling with a series of tubes acting like umbilical cords.

The pods vaguely call to mind Frei Otto's experiments with stacked soap bubbles, but they are filled with air and water inside them, and they respond to external (carbon dioxide levels, humidity and temperature values transmitted to the pods by the sensors located outside the pavilion) or unseen stimuli, inviting visitors to become more aware of the changes around them.  

While it may not be as engaging as other projects that involved the use of technology in previous years, "Another Generosity" is still worth seeing as the pods create a futuristic setting, even though the final aim of the project – sadly among the very few ones presented at this year's Biennale that establish a connection between technology and nature – is definitely not just visual but it consists in inspiring in the next few months a wider discussion about nature and humankind, architecture and ecology, and organisms and machines.

As Eero Lundén states in the press release accompanying this project: "With today's mounting environmental challenges, we have the responsibility to restore the balance between the built and natural environment. Architecture as our most fundamental technology needs to be reinvented and, as architects, we must consider who or what we are building for."

Fine, I'll Take The House Tour: The Pavilion of Switzerland, Golden Lion Award @ The 16th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice

The first impression visitors get upon entering the Pavilion of Switzerland at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice is definitely not surprise, but alienation. The most striking features you spot while walking along one corridor are indeed a series of large window frames with milky glass panels projecting into the building a disturbing white light.

A sense of boring normality invests you, as you realise you are touring an empty and unfurnished house, an anonymous modern apartment. At the same time this could be a clinical and austere environment, a lab of some sort where a crazy doctor carries out secret experiments about the mind; or it could be a physical metaphor for a representation of the human brain, and we're now walking through our minds and consciences.

Yet, once you turn a corner the ominous feeling dispels and transforms into a smile: you've just arrived in an empty kitchen, like the ones you may find in a brand new apartment, surrounded by basic interior design features such as handles, skirting boards, power outlets, light switches, countertops and cupboards, but all these elements are bigger than you, which means that either you have shrunk or the pavilion has become gigantic.

You keep on smiling when you realise that you, or rather your visit, is the real protagonist of the pavilion: you resume your tour as things become more confusing and discover a tiny door to access a veranda that does not open, or further labyrinthine spaces.

The idea behind the pavilion conceived by architects Alessandro Bosshard, Li Tavor, Matthew van der Ploeg and Ani Vihervaara, is actually not that of provoking an architectural Alice in Wonderland feeling in the visitors, but in reproducing the concept of the house tour.

The pavilion is indeed entitled "Svizzera 240: House Tour" - the number refers to the usual size of a new flat that routinely consists of 240 cm in height, white walls, parquet or tile flooring, and off the shelf-fittings. The idea of the house tour was also inspired by an episode in the "Curb Your Enthusiasm" series in which Susie offers Larry a tour around the new house, which he turns down, offending her. 

You can usually take real or virtual house tours, but the architects behind this project have noticed that in Switzerland it has become rather popular to publish images of empty houses, pictures that end up provoking not a sense of desire for a brand new space to turn into your own environment, but that trigger a sense of detachment. The project can also be read as a critique - it seems indeed that in our times architects have turned into agents of an inflated real estate market.

The team behind the projects decided to play with sizes and dimensions since generic images of empty apartments on sale or rent portray architectures designed for somebody who still hasn't occupied it, and, when you look at these images, you can't imagine the real proportions of the house.

"The House Tour" tries to suggest visitors a physical rendering of those images with completely wrong dimensions and scales going from 1:1 to 2:1 passing through 1:5, 1:2, 1:1.6, 1:1.3 (just to mention a few), suggesting visitors entirely new relations between imaginary and real architectural spaces.

The elements surrounding you in the pavilion are banal, but they lose their familiarity trapping you in an alien and neutral world, in a game of defamiliarisation and estrangement. The trick works so well that quite a few visitors get lost and struggle to find the exit, but, once they get out, they just want to take the tour again, to check if they imagined what they saw or if it is real.

This is not a building nor a house you can dream of inhabiting, the young architects behind it conceived it indeed as a reproduction of a house tour that you contemplate as you would contemplate the images projected in Plato's cave. This is what makes the project different from other ones presented at this year's architecture biennale: the pavilion of Switzerland is not about a model celebrating architecture for its own sake, but it is about the ability to build a representation and an idea of architecture.

There is actually a further layer to consider in this installation: as visitors become house tourists, they start reading the pavilion with their eyes and project on the spaces surrounding them their own interpretation of the themes tackled in the pavilion, at times completely misunderstanding them and drawing the wrong conclusions (most visitors feel elated and immediately start taking selfies to post on Instagram, without really getting to the core of the house tour concept...).

The idea behind the pavilion is simple and the space is minimal, but it is a winning idea for its power to confuse, disturb and amaze you at the same time.

Last Saturday the International jury at the Venice Biennale awarded to the pavilion the Golden Lion for Best National Participation (to be honest, while in other Biennale events you could have singled out at least 5 projects who may have got a Golden Lion, in this case it was almost too easy to spot Switzerland as the winner...) with the following motivation "for a compelling architectural installation that is at once enjoyable while tackling the critical issues of scale in domestic space."

The team of "Svizzera 240: House Tour" stated in a press release about the award: "We are extremely excited to receive this Golden Lion for our exhibition at the Swiss Pavilion after having won a public competition. Svizzera 240 is about looking at empty flats. We want to take the visitors on a house tour, which offers you an exaggerated architectural sensibility through which you see the peculiarities of your own home from the perspective of an outsider. We very much hope that this opens up new ways of reflecting on the role the apartments' interior shell plays in shaping our lives and our identities."

The Pavilion of Switzerland is accompanied by a collateral programme of events, talks and debates that will take place at Palazzo Trevisan degli Ulivi, in the Dorsoduro area, throughout September, October and November. 

Image credits for this post

1 - 8 The Pavilion of Switzerland at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition, May 2018, by Anna Battista

9. The project team for the Swiss Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, May 2018. Left to right, Alessandro Bosshard, Li Tavor, Matthew van der Ploeg and Ani Vihervaara. Photo: Christian Beutler / KEYSTONE.