La Biennale di Venezia, the Exhibition of resonances

The 13th International Architecture Exhibition titled Common Ground, directed by David Chipperfield and organized by la Biennale di Venezia chaired by Paolo Baratta, is open to the public from Wednesday August 29th until Sunday November 25th 2012, at the Giardini della Biennale and at the Arsenale. The Preview took place on August 27th and 28th, the awards and inauguration ceremony was held on Wednesday August 29th, 2012 at Giardini.

The 13th Exhibition has arisen and developed from the path of research that la Biennale di Venezia carries out in the field of architecture, which in turn has made la Biennale a major event over the years.

The Exhibition designed by Chipperfield is spread over 10.000 square meters in a path from the Central Pavilion at the Giardini to the Arsenale. It comprises 69 projects made by a r c h i tects, photographers, artists, critics and scholars. Many have responded to the invitation of the Director with original proposals and installations expressly created for this Biennale, involving other colleagues with whom they share a Common Ground in their projects. There are a total of 119 participants.

"With this year’s theme, Common Ground, we go back to talking about architecture– explains Paolo Baratta -to help architects emerge from the crisis of identity they are going through, and at the same time offering the public a chance to look inside architecture, make it familiar and discover that something can be asked of it, that something different is possible, that we are not condemned to passive acceptance." Civil society is made up of individuals and institutions. These do not always seem capable of identifying the requirements for organizing the space we live in. In order to mend this fracture, la Biennale can make its contribution primarily by posing these as its themes. While not denying that there is a problem in the relationship between architecture and ecology, architecture and technology, and architecture and town planning, the crux is to mend the fracture between architecture and civil society."

 David Chip­perfield clarifies that he chose this theme “to encourage my colleagues to react against the pre­valent professional and cultural ten­dencies of our time that place such emphasis on individual and isolated actions. I encouraged them instead to demonstrate the importance of influence and of the continuity of cultural endeavour, to illustrate com­mon and shared ideas that form the basis of an architectural culture“.

“Italy remains the spiritual home of architecture – adds Chip­perfield. Here we can fully unders­tand the importance of buildings not as individual spectacles but as the manifestations of collective values and as the settings for daily life. This tangible sense of context and history remind us that our built world is a testament to the continuous evolu­tion of architectural language and critical to our understanding of the world around us.

For President Baratta “Chipperfield’s exhibition is made up of resonances, where the irrevo­cable relationship between architec­ture, space, and town planning will re-emerge from the notes of the resonance”. The President invites one to look at “the interest of the architects taking part in the city, with particular attention paid to the recovery of existing buildings and the upgrading of urban spaces; or one looks to those participants who have drawn inspiration from the clo­se link with past masters, remote or recent, or instigated associations with other grand contemporary colleagues.”Baratta suggests to try the “built architecture, from full sca­le reconstructions of existing buil­dings to the emerge from intricate balances of structural forces; from the materialization of the concept of architectural and cultural heritage as a basis « for the search for and cons­truction of new realities», through to the structures arising out of the association of Álvaro Siza Vieira and Eduardo Souto de Moura.”

“This conception of the exhibi­tion is an important innovation in the history of architecture exhibitions – concludes Baratta – because inevita­bly provokes a modification not only in the relationship between architect and curator, but also a change in the approach of the architects called upon to work out their participation. The exhibition thus becomes a space in which they realize an idea and a system of relations between archi­tecture of both past and present, whereby that which is exhi­bited is reciprocally va­lued.”