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.
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