Peter Lang, an assistant professor of architecture who teaches for the Texas A&M College of Architecture at the Santa Chiara Study Center in Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy, will be participating in two projects in the 11th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale — a major contemporary art exhibition held every two years in Venice, Italy.
Themed ”Out There: Architecture Beyond Building,” the exhibition, which runs Sept. 14 – Nov. 23, will be directed by Aaron Betsky, who served for six years as director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) in Rotterdam, and is currently director of the Cincinnati Art Museum.
The 2008 exhibition, Betsky said, “will point the way towards an architecture liberated from buildings to engage the central issues of our society; instead of the tombs of architecture, which is to say buildings, it will present site specific installations, visions and experiments that help us figure out, make sense of and feel at home in our modern world.”
Lang will be participating in Venice Biennale exhibits and presentations slated for both the Italian Pavilion and The Netherlands Pavilion.
“ArchiPhoenix – Faculties of Architecture,” in The Netherlands Pavilion is organized by the NAI in collaboration with STEALTH.unlimited, an experimental group that Lang has worked with for a few years. The exhibit was conceived in the aftermath of a May 13, 2008 fire that destroyed the Faculty of Architecture of the Delft University of Technology, an internationally acclaimed architecture school that has produced a generation of world famous architects such as Herman Hertzberger, Winy Maas, Willem-Jan Neutelings, and NL Architects. Using this catastrophe as its impetus, the exhibit will reexamine the position of the architecture discipline and look beyond the building.
To this end, the Dutch exhibit will feature an experimental garden, an exercise in possible “faculties” for architecture aimed at exploring architecture for the 21st century. The garden will feature multiple exhibits by leading architects accompanied by series of workshops and public debates, slated Sept. 11 – 14, featuring such luminaries as Rem Koolhaas and possibly Pliny Fisk, from the Texas A&M College of Architecture.
Lang will be moderating one of these roundtable discussions on Sept. 11, following the presentation, “Beyond the Profitable Simplicity into the Societal Sustainability: Why We Make,” featuring guest editorials by Jeanne van Heeswijk and Dennis Kaspori, who will spar with Miguel Robles. This session will ask if there is another drive to architectural practice beyond economic pragmatics and if such a critical new concept could have economic feasibility without being profitable.
The discussion will feature: Jeanne van Heeswijk, from the Netherlands ; Elemental, from Chile; Kai Vöckler of Archis Intervention Prishtina, from Germany.
“In this situation,” said Lang, “the project will mediate between the interests of the private developers and the necessary regulation by the state in regard to the needs of the community."
In the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Lang will be participating with another experimental group, STALKER, in the creation of “Casa per Rom,” or a “Home for Gypsies.” The house, Lang said, was built with the STALKER’s assistance by and for gypsies in the nomad camp, Casalina 900, in Rome.
For details on the 11th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, visit http://www.labiennale.org/en/architecture/exhibition/
Stealth.unlimited projects:
http://www.stealth.ultd.net/stealth/#link1
Stalker website:
http://digilander.libero.it/stalkerlab/tarkowsky/tarko.html
- August 28, 2008 -
