The eleventh Venice Architecture Biennale is currently in full swing, with installations from a variety of architects, designers and studios ranging from the US's Rural Studio to Zaha Hadid (pictured right). As I am currently nowhere near Italy I am content to tour the pavillions virtually via David Levene's excellent photographs. If you had been hoping to see a naked man performing with a musical saw, look no further. Truthfully I was more struck by a picture of a pencil drawing from the wall of the Japanese pavillion, in which a cross-section of an apartment coexists next to a delicately-rendered fern frond. In his review of the Biennale Jonathan Glancey says that Japanese architecture students drew right onto the walls over the course of 20 days, concocting their own answer to the exhibition's directive to propose ideas for new, sensuous buildings:
The overall design, by the young Tokyo architect Junya Ishigami, is strikingly beautiful. "The buildings and towns shown here," Ishigami tells me, "include everything from actual projects to studies for works-in-progress to imaginary exercises. I hope some new vision might come into clearer focus by laying out these different realities." Here, then, is a dreamlike architecture that could be made real - a gentle and rather beautiful vision of buildings growing like plants, as appealing to adults as to children.
Idealistic yes, but it seems like the most perfectly minimalist way of looking to nature for inspiration in architecture. Even just the description makes me happy.
