Opening. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014
05/06/2014.
Venice Biennale 2014. [VEN] Italy. 07.06 > 23.11.2014
metalocus, JOSÉ JUAN BARBA
metalocus, JOSÉ JUAN BARBA
Today June 5 takes place the Spanish Pavilion's public presentation for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2014. Under the title 'Interior', curator Iñaki Abalos seeks to reflect on modernity in the twentieth century, as proposed by general curator Rem Koolhaas. This is reflected on a selection of twelve current projects by Spanish architects.
Previous schemes, Iñaki Ábalos. The Labyrinth ot Labyrinths. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014. Image © courtesy of curatorship team.
Projected pictures diagrams. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014. Image © courtesy of curatorship team.
Special elements. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014. Image © courtesy of curatorship team.
Transverse sections. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014. Image © courtesy of curatorship team.
Organization of the rooms. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014. Image © courtesy of curatorship team.
Construction process. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014. Photography © courtesy of Acción Cultural Española.
Construction process. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014. Photography © courtesy of Acción Cultural Española.
Construction process. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014. Photography © courtesy of Acción Cultural Española.
Construction process. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014. Photography © courtesy of Acción Cultural Española.
Photographic installation test. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014. Photography © courtesy of curatorship team.
Francisco Giner de los Ríos Foundation, Madrid. Amid.cero9, Madrid. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014. Photography © José Hevia.
L'Atlàntida. Cultural Center in Vic, Barcelona. Josep Llinàs i Carmona, Barcelona. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014. Photography © José Hevia.
Classroom and department block for Pablo de Olavide University, Seville. MGM + Miguel Hernández Valencia, Seville. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014. Photography © José Hevia.
20 social dwellings + 3 shops, Madrid. Solid Arquitectura - Soto Maroto Architects, Madrid. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014. Photography © José Hevia.
Oostcampus, Oostkamp (Belgium). Carlos Arroyo Architects, Madrid. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014. Photography © José Hevia.
Cinema Center in Matadero Madrid, Madrid. Churtichaga + Quadra - Salcedo Arquitectos, Madrid. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014. Photography © José Hevia.
The new Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Cruz y Ortiz Arquitectos, Seville and Amsterdam. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014. Photography © José Hevia.
Red Bull Academy, Matadero Nave, Madrid. Langarita - Navarro Arquitectos, Madrid. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014. Photography © José Hevia.
Casa Mediterráneo Headquarters in Alicante, Alicante. Manuel Ocaña Architecture and Thought Production Office, Madrid. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014. Photography © José Hevia.
High speed train station and urban park in Logroño, La Rioja. Ábalos + Sentkiewicz Arquitectos, Madrid and Boston. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014. Photography © José Hevia.
Luceros Station, Alicante. Javier García-Solera Vera, Alicante. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014. Photography © José Hevia.
Marquee for les cols restaurant, Olot, Girona. RCR Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramón Vilalta, Olot. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014. Photography © José Hevia.
Poster. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014. Image © courtesy of Abalos+Sentkiewicz arquitectos.
Overview. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014. Photography © courtesy of Acción Cultural Española.
Overview. Spanish Pavilion Biennale di Venezia 2014. Photography © courtesy of Acción Cultural Española.
Interior. Spain Pavilion. Photography © Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy la Biennale di Venezia.
Interior. Spain Pavilion. Photography © Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy la Biennale di Venezia.
Interior. Spain Pavilion. Photography © Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy la Biennale di Venezia.
Interior. Spain Pavilion. Photography © Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy la Biennale di Venezia.
Interior. Spain Pavilion. Photography © Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy la Biennale di Venezia.
Interior. Spain Pavilion. Photography © Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy la Biennale di Venezia.
'Interior' builds labyrinths and interiors within interiors, breaking down the central space of the Spanish Pavilion. Multiple routes can be taken by the visitors, avoiding the interiors to appear as isolated capsules. The exhibition refers explicitly to the Ulm Pavilion designed by Max Bill for the Baden-Württemberg State Fair in Stuttgart (1956) and its use of the image and the frame. While Max Bill’s Pavilion was based on the repetition of four elements in a spiral, the proposal for the Spanish Pavilion establishes a complex structure in which the images of the twelve projects presented are interrelated between themselves and to a historical context, in a double time warp that generates new categories.
“The curator of the current Venice Architecture Biennale, Rem Koolhaas, has called for reflections on the past, present and future of architecture under the title Fundamentals, an invitation for the national pavilions to investigate the assimilation of modernity over the 100 years since the start of World War I: Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014. On the first centenary of the episode that marked the end of a way of understanding the world - and ultimately its architecture as well - we are now starting to take in the changes to today’s economically and cultural global society, one of the proposed focal points for the Elements of Architecture exhibition in the central pavilion of the Biennale.
In the Spanish Pavilion, curator Iñaki Ábalos focuses the visitor’s gaze on the Interior, particularly on the way a small cluster of environment-related issues (characteristic of the Spanish climate) have been used to configure an architecture exemplified by twelve remarkable works which are radically contemporary but at the same time linked to a solid tradition”.
EXTRACTS FROM “INTERIOR”
“Paradoxically, the architectural interior is in quite good dialectical shape but in a terrible historical state, practically abandoned for an almost ubiquitous technical approach that resolves the project with an envelope of maximized intensity and an extremely banal interior layout.
In this context, the vindication of the Interior could be interpreted as a partial analysis of Spain’s 20th century architectural tradition and an historic tradition that dates back to Roman and Arab architecture. While it is true that during the initial modernity of the 20th century as well as the period following the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), and indeed until recently, Spanish architecture has produced an admirable variety of interiors, it can also be said that many of these earlier interiors and their wealth of material and spatial solutions were somewhat “forced” by the scarcity of resources available to modern architects in a country devastated by war. Viewed from a distance in time, we can see that these architects were responsible for the inheritance of a renowned, palpable taste for heterodoxy and experimentation in our younger generations. This continuity has contributed to the positive international image now projected by Spanish architecture, with its material, constructional and spatial richness, its refined relationship between public and private space, and its almost unique ability to interpret the past in continuity with the present. More importantly, these features can be regarded as essential qualities for work with a clear purpose and intent in the contemporary global context.
The project implicit to the choice of Interior as the central theme for the Spanish Pavilion at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale is not so much a vindication of retroactive know-how that looks at itself in the past, as the use of the two formulae proposed by the Biennale’s chief curator Rem Koolhaas, Fundamentals and Absorbing Modernity: 1914-2014, to provoke and steer debate about the validity of the modern experience in the contemporary context. In other words, it is a projective view of the impossibility of fully maintaining the modern agenda, and the way this has facilitated the construction of a heterodox heritage which can, ipso facto, become part of our contemporary culture and be distinguished from the orthodox surrender of the modern to the technocratic mechanics of the interior, vulgarized by commercial products and systems that lead to the disappearance of any possibility of control or design of space. This is not so much a historiographical as a projective, forward-looking review which focuses on the shortcomings of the modern project, drafted from the techno-scientific and cultural perspective of the dual digital and thermodynamic change of course that has had a direct impact on the creative methods and ideas about the role of architecture in contemporary society (…).”
Text by.- Iñaki Ábalos
CREDITS.-
Curator.- Iñaki Ábalos.
Deputy curator.- Enrique Encabo, Inma E. Maluenda y Lluís Ortega.
Promoter.- Gobierno de España. MINISTERIO DE FOMENTO. Secretaría de Estado de Infraestructuras, Transporte y Vivienda. Dirección General de Arquitectura, Vivienda y Suelo.
In collaboration with.- AC/E, ACCIÓN CULTURAL ESPAÑOLA. MINISTERIO DE ASUNTOS EXTERIORES Y DE COOPERACIÓN. Secretaría de Estado de Cooperación Internacional. AECID, Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo. Dirección de Relaciones Culturales y Científicas
With the support of.- FUNDACIÓN CAJA DE ARQUITECTOS.
Dates.- 07 June 2014 - 23 November 2014.
Venue.- Spanish Pavilion. Giardini. Venice, Italy.
I Giardini. Pabellón español
07 Jun 2014 - 23 Nov 2014
More information
IÑAKI ÁBALOS
Iñaki Abalos, (San Sebastián, 1956) graduated from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid ETSAM(1978), before going on to become a Doctor of Architecture, PHD (1991), and Professor of Architectural Project Design at he ETSAM. In 2009 he was Kenzo Tange Professor in Harvard University and since 2010 has been a guest professor at the Graduate School of Design (GSD).
A founder member of Ábalos&Herreros (1984-2007) and of Ábalos+Sentkiewicz arquitectos (since 2007), he has sat on the scientific committee of the Study Center of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal (since 2005) and on the management board of the Barcelona Institute of Architecture (since 2008).
He is the director of the Laboratorio de Técnicas y Paisajes Contemporáneos (Madrid, since 2002), and in 2009 the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) awarded him its international membership. He has taught at the Architectural Association (London), the EPF (Lausanne) and at the universities of Columbia, Princeton and Cornell.
Ábalos is the author of Le Corbusier. Rascacielos (Ayuntamiento de Madrid, 1988), Tower and office (The MIT Press, Cambridge [Mass.], 2003) and Natural-artificial (ExitLMI, Madrid, 1999), with Juan Herreros; and The good life (Editorial Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2000), the two volumes of Atlas pintoresco (Editorial Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2005 and 2007), and the monograph Alejandro de la Sota (Fundación Caja de Arquitectos, Barcelona, 2009; with Josep Llinàs and Moisés Puente). He also edited Naturaleza y artificio (Editorial Gustavo Gili, Barcelona,2009).
AS+. ÁBALOS+SENTKIEWICZ ARQUITECTOS
Ábalos+Sentkiewicz arquitectos, AS+. Madrid-based architecture practice was founded and led by Iñaki Ábalos and Renata Sentkiewicz in 2006. The practice has local offices in Cambridge (USA) and Shanghai (China).
Iñaki Ábalos and Renata Sentkiewicz have taught in prestigious university centres such as GSD-Harvard University, Architectural Association, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, and ETSAM, combining academic, professional and research activities. Iñaki Ábalos has been Chair of the Department of Architecture at GSD Harvard University and RIBA International Fellowship 2009 (Royal Institute of British Architects). Abalos is currently Chaired Professor at ETSAM.
The projects and built work of Abalos+Sentkiewicz AS+ are internationally recognized and have been the subject of individual exhibitions and many collective exhibitions in the most prestigious centres: GSD Harvard, AA-London, Pavillon de l’Arsenale-Paris, MoMA-NYC (5 built works in three different exhibitions: Light construction, ON Site, Groundswell), Chicago Architecture Biennial, Biennale di Architettura di Venezia, etc. This prestige also reflects in the 40 awards received (25 of them first prizes) in architecture competitions. Another 46 awards have been given to different research and design activities, 19 of them to Built Works. Their professional work has been collected in 12 monographs and their theoretical work has been compiled through 12 books. Critic William Curtis has chosen one work of the firm, the Pavilion in the Retiro Park, as one of the three best works built in Spain during the last 30 years.
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