Casa Areia by Aires Mateus Architects

Dezeen are in Venice for the opening of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2010 where Lisbon firm Aires Mateus Architects are exhibiting these houses with sandy floors, photographed by Nelson Garrido.

Called Casa Areia, the project comprises seaside accommodation made of wooden frames covered in natural fibres.

Sand covers the floor in the kitchen and living space, connecting them to the beach and landscape outside.

Bedrooms are housed in separate structures.

The Venice Architecture Biennale runs 29 August – 21 November 2010.

Here’s some text about the Casa Areia project from Garrido:

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This construction is composed by 4 little houses in a place near the sea.

They where reconstructed with traditional methods using wood and a traditional stem.

This project was build on the sand that is a natural and abundant material that was transported to the interior of the common places (the living room and the kitchen) giving this way the connection between the environment and the new and totally integrated construction.

This is the most spectacular on this project, being on the living room with your feet on the sand, this is a totally comfortable construction even with warming floor that warms up the sand.

Hylozoic Ground by Philip Beesley

Venice Architecture Biennale 2010: Toronto architect Philip Beesley has installed a forest of acrylic fronds that move as though breathing inside the Canada pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, which opens this week.

Called Hylozoic Ground, the installation is covered in sensors, microprocessors, mechanical joints and filters.

Above photograph copyright Pierre Charron

These allow the structure to move in response to its environment, drawing in and filtering moisture and organic particles from the air.

Above photograph copyright Pierre Charron

The title refers to hylozoism, an ancient philosophical view that matter has life, and proposes a future city that would operate as a living being.

Above photograph copyright Pierre Charron

Beesley collaborated with University of Waterloo engineering director Rob Gorbet and chemist Rachel Armstrong.

The Venice Architecture Biennale opens 29 August – 21 November 2010.

Here are some more details from Beesley:

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HYLOZOIC GROUND ‐ PHILIP BEESLEY
CANADA PAVILION AT THE 12th INTERNATIONAL ARCHITECTURE EXHIBITION – LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA

For the 12th International Architecture Exhibition Hylozoic Ground transforms the Canada Pavilion with an immersive, interactive environment made of tens of thousands of lightweight digitally-fabricated components fitted with meshed microprocessors and sensors. The glass-like fragility of this artificial forest is built of an intricate lattice of small transparent acrylic meshwork links, covered with a network of interactive mechanical fronds, filters and whiskers. The environment is similar to a coral reef, following cycles of opening, clamping, filtering and digesting. Arrays of touch sensors create waves of diffuse breathing motion, luring visitors into the shimmering depths of a forest of light. The project is designed by Philip Beesley, Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Waterloo, with engineering director Rob Gorbet, experimental chemist Rachel Armstrong, and many collaborators.

The project’s title refers to ‘hylozoism’, the ancient belief that all matter has life. Hylozoic Ground offers a vision for a new generation of responsive architecture. The Hylozoic Ground environment can be described as a suspended geotextile that gradually accumulates hybrid soil from ingredients drawn from its surroundings. Akin to the functions of a living system, embedded machine intelligence allows human interaction to trigger breathing, caressing, and swallowing motions and hybrid metabolic exchanges. These empathic motions ripple out from hives of kinetic valves and pores in peristaltic waves, creating a diffuse pumping that pulls air, moisture and stray organic matter through the filtering Hylozoic membranes. ‘Living’ chemical exchanges are conceived as the first stages of self-renewing functions that might take root within this architecture.

HYLOZOIC GROUND BOOK LAUNCH

Philip Beesley’s Hylozoic Ground publication, edited by Pernilla Ohrstedt and Hayley Isaacs, will be launched during the opening reception of the Hylozoic Ground installation. This book describes Philip Beesley’s Hylozoic Ground project as it has evolved over the past five years and includes generous design documentation and installation photographs. In addition to contributions by colleagues at PBAI and collaborators Rob Gorbet and Rachel Armstrong, the book contains a curated collection of essays by Michelle Addington, Geoff Manaugh, Neil Spiller, and Cary Wolfe. Preface by Eric Haldenby and Detlef Mertins.

Emergency Exit by Agnieszka Kurant and Aleksandra Wasilkowska

Venice Architecture Biennale 2010: visitors to the Polish pavilion at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale launch themselves off a pile of birdcages into a sea of artificial clouds.

Called Emergency Exit, the installation by Agnieszka Kurant and Aleksandra Wasilkowska consists of empty metal cages stacked up to form the jumping platform, smoke machines and a neon sign spelling out ‘Emergency Exit’.

The pavilion was curated by Elias Redstone.

See all our stories about the Venice Architecture Biennal in our special category.

Here’s some more information from the designers:

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Emergency Exit.
Agnieszka Kurant and Aleksandra Wasilkowska

Polish Pavilion at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice

‘A neon Emergency Exit sign hangs on the facade of the Polish Pavilion. Inside, a surreal structure made of hundreds of reclaimed bird cages hides a path to its summit.

It is lit from within, suggesting a night landscape, a fantastical de-materialized world containing an object and an action. You climb the seemingly precarious structure. At the height of the summit you look down into a churning sea of clouds. Your breath catches, your pulse quickens; you look down, then out, and then leap blindly into the void. . .

The installation Emergency Exit by artist Agnieszka Kurant and architect Aleksandra Wasilkowska seeks to go beyond the logic of urban reality through the creation of ‘urban portable holes’: in-between spaces, places of uncertainty and doubt, of time-space discontinuity, such as abandoned or unfinished buildings, sites of catastrophe or accidents, illegal markets, rooftops and tunnels. The title refers ironically to the health and safety regulations in buildings and urban space that seek to plan, control risk and eliminate the accidental and unexpected.

The installation is constructed from an aggregate of metal cages, more commonly used to contain birds and prevent flight, to create a new fictional sport within the urban context. The design makes reference to the forms of decaying sports monuments, such as the ski jump in Mokotów, Warsaw—a surrealistic icon of socialist era architecture thatis now in ruins. During a test phase, visitors will be able to climb to the top of the structure and jump out into artificially generated clouds, representing ultimate freedom and urban escapism. The Polish Pavilion acts as a laboratory within which Emergency Exit engages with the public directly to provoke, inspire and excite the collective body. These actions will be documented and then presented within the Pavilion.

Kurant and Wasilkowska interpret the city as an unpredictable, complex system whose collective understanding is composed of intersecting real and imaginary spaces changed through extremely rare events. Nine out of ten things that influence our behaviour and thinking are invisible or intangible. Factors such as myths, rumours and legends overlay themselves onto the physical environment to create an urban morphology of augmented landscapes. At the same time, spontaneity and risk exist as human characteristics that can work against a rational layer of control within the urban fabric. Both invisible phenomena and social actions can change the dynamic of a street, borough, or even the entire city. Architects and planners are therefore unable to precisely anticipate all the needs and transformations of the city. If a rigid and deterministic master plan is unable to integrate emergent needs and changes then the whole city looses its equilibrium.

Emergency Exit is conceived as a hybrid machine for the transfer to other realities, perforating the system of the city. It is a portable hole to the unknown; a catalyst for different, contradictory emotions and needs. Through the transfer, people fill in the gaps with their own emotions, ideas and desires. Kurant and Wasilkowska see the moment of jumping as an exit from the modernist paradigm in architecture where emotional, affective space was ignored and considered an obsolete ornament. The activity materialises the need and desire to lose control, to free oneself both physically and metaphorically from the current system; from a dominant paradigm, logic or state. To get out of here.

The project promotes an approach to architecture and urbanism that reverses the logic of a unilaterally defined urban reality and deterministic master plan; it embraces the unknown phenomena of the city; introduces a higher flexibility of the urban tissue through integrating interstices, gaps and pores, and leaving people space to plug-in or plug-out of dominant urban structures through developing individual, self-organising activities and actions.

Polish participation in the 12th International Art Exhibition in Venice was made possible through the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.

Pavilion Commissioner Agnieszka Morawińska
Curator Elias Redstone
Assistant Commissioner Joanna Waśko

organization of the exhibition
Zachęta National Gallery of Art

Promotion supported by Adam Mickiewicz Institute
Legal advisor of Zachęta White & Case
Sponsor of the exhibition PERI Polska

Vacant NL by Rietveld Landscape

Venice Architecture Biennale 2010: a blue-foam model city is suspended in the top half of the Dutch pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Entitled Vacant NL, the installation curated by Rietveld Landscape aims to highlight the potential of temporarily vacant government space for use by creative enterprises.

Visitors enter on the empty ground floor while the models are suspended on wires overhead.

Ascending to the mezzanine reveals the cityscape from above and a drawing created with threads and pins.

See all our stories about Venice Architecture Biennale 2010»

Top image is copyright Rob ‘t Hart.

Here’s some more information from the Netherlands Architecture Institute:

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Thousands of buildings in the Netherlands lie vacant. Some of them for a week or a few months, many even for years. During the twelfth Venice Architecture Biennale, the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) and Rietveld Landscape will highlight the huge potential of all that temporarily unoccupied space in making the Netherlands one of the top-five knowledge economies in the world. The exhibition Vacant NL, where architecture meets ideas is a call for the intelligent reuse of temporarily vacant buildings around the world in promoting creative enterprise. The Venice Architecture Biennale takes place from 29 August 29 to 21 November 2010.

Built in 1954, the Dutch Pavilion on the biennale grounds in Venice has been empty for over 39 years. After all, it is in use for just three months each year. That makes it one of the thousands of unoccupied government buildings on Dutch soil. Rietveld Landscape, the office appointed by the NAI to curate the Dutch presentation in Venice, decided to emphasize the vacancy of the pavilion during the architecture biennale. The experience of the empty space will sink into visitors, and only then will they discover the hidden installation.

Vacant NL, where architecture meets ideas is not only an appeal to creative talents to exploit the value hidden in society but also unsolicited advice to countries who want to advance up the table of global knowledge economies but don’t know where they can find the hidden strengths. The transition to a creative knowledge economy demands specific spatial conditions. Offering young talents from the creative, technology and science sectors an affordable place where they can share their knowledge, creativity and networks is a way of promoting mutual influences, enterprise and innovation. Vacant NL, where architecture meets ideas shows how architecture can contribute to tackling major social problems. The exhibition is therefore fully in line with the NAI innovation agenda called Architecture of Consequence.

Project team

Curator Rietveld Landscape worked with a multidisciplinary team on the exhibition design. The team consists of Jurgen Bey (designer), Joost Grootens (graphic designer), Ronald Rietveld (landscape architect), Erik Rietveld (philosopher/economist), Saskia van Stein (NAI curator), Barbara Visser (visual artist).

Twelfth edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale

This year the artistic direction of the Venice Architecture Biennale is in the hands of the Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima (SANAA). The overarching theme is People meet in architecture, in which Sejima raises the question of the quality of architecture in relation to society.

The Dutch entry will be presented by the Netherlands Architecture Institute on behalf of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.

The Russia Factory by Sergei Tchoban, Pavel Khoroshilov and Grigory Revzin

Venice Architecture Biennale 2010: the Russian pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale presents possibilities for the re-use of vacant factories in former industrial towns across Russia.

The project focusses on the town of Vyshny Volochok, situated halfway between Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Click for larger image

Architects were invited to design conceptual redevelopment schemes for each of the town’s four disused industrial zones.

Visitors to the pavilion watch a movie examining life in the Vyshny Volochok area, before progressing to a cylindrical room where a panoramic painting depicts the proposed redevelopments.

A third room displays detailed information about each of the four sites and projects.

The curators argue that the re-instatement of these spaces as centres for the town’s development through use as cultural educational and social destinations could be rolled out to revitalise similar post-industrial towns across Russia.

Entitled The Russia factory, the pavilion was curated by Sergei Tchoban, Pavel Khoroshilov and Grigory Revzin.

See all our stories about Venice Architecture Biennal in our special category.

Photographs are by Patricia Parinejad.

The following information is from the curators:

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Pavilion of Russia at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia

The Russia Factory

In the last 20 years Russian towns and cities have been undergoing a period of de-industrialization: old factories in industrial towns have been closing down while new ones have yet to spring up in their place. This presents serious problems for urban planning: Russia today has many towns and cities in which factories that were formerly the core of a place’s development are now at a standstill and constitute disused and ruined urban space. Industrial zones can occupy up to a third of the territory of a town or city and their current condition has a depressive influence on the environment and inhabitants.

Existing industrial zones have already had resources (energy, materials, labour) invested in them, and their destruction requires further investment – confronting us with the prospect of endless expenditure of resources since each cycle in the development of a site begins from scratch. From the point of view of urban design, factory buildings in small towns are the foundation of the urban fabric. Factories shape the scale of the towns in which they stand. It is they that store the town’s memory and determine its identity.

The idea on which the Russia Factory project is based is to treat industrial zones as historical landscape that is open to universal transformation. Curators propose a strategy of preserving surviving architectural structures, with close attention being paid to opportunities for converting these buildings for use for all kinds of urban functions – housing, education, medicine, trade, public space, management, hotels, etc., etc. The project involves re-conceiving the industrial zone as a mixed-use urban environment which is reincorporated in the town and serves as a focus for the latter’s development.

The Russian pavilion at this biennale is for the first time showing not an ‘exhibition of achievements’ by a single architect or a group of architects, but a conceptual project created specially for the biennale and oriented on the future. As the basis for the project the curators have selected the town of Vyshny Volochok in Tver Province. Vyshny Volochok is situated halfway between Moscow and St. Petersburg and has a system of canals created by Peter the Great. This situation has strong similarities with that of Venice (to give visitors to the biennale a better idea of the town’s position). Were it to be modernized and the surrounding small towns to be revitalized, this could lead to a denser network of centres of culture, science, and tourism lying between the two major cities – which in turn would serve to bring Russia closer to Europe. Vyshny Volochok developed as a centre of the textile industry. It contains four large industrial zones – the Tabolka Factory, the Paris Commune Factory, the Integrated Cotton Factory, and the Aelita Factory. All these factories are within walking distance of the town centre. The town centre, which contains buildings erected in Petersburg architectural styles from the Classical and Empire periods, has degraded and is in a partly ruined state. No new factories or infrastructure serving the railway, main road, or waterways, have been built.

The curators‘ project was executed in two stages. To begin with, we analyzed potential functions for the town’s industrial zones on the basis of the needs and capabilities of the town’s residents, as well as on the basis of possibilities for incorporating ‘external’ functions that might take advantage of the town’s location. We drew up a possible brief for a reconstruction project on the basis of social and economic parameters. Next, Sergei Tchoban supervised the creation of a master plan for reconstruction of the town, and then specific industrial sites, together with potential functions for these sites, were offered as design projects to five architecture firms – two from Moscow (Vladimir Plotkin and Sergey Skuratov), two from St. Petersburg (Evgeny Gerasimov and Nikita Yaveyn), and architectural firm SPEECH Tchoban/Kuznetsov, which designs buildings for both the major cities between which lies the town of Vyshny Volochok.

The Russia Factory is a model project. There are more than 300 towns like Vyshny Volochok in Russia today. It is fundamentally important that architects today should form their own agenda and offer society an idea that can serve as an aspiration.

The Russian Pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale in Venice was built in 1913 to a design by Aleksey Shchusev. In 2010 it has been completely restored by architect Clemente di Thiene. The restoration was financed by OAO Alfa Bank.

Commisioner: Vasily Tsereteli
Curators: Sergei Tchoban, Pavel Khoroshilov, Grigory Revzin
Architects: Evgeny Gerasimov, Vladimir Plotkin, Sergey Skuratov, Sergei
Tchoban and Sergey Kuznetsov (with Alena Akhmadullina), Nikita Yaveyn
Exhbition design: SPEECH Tchoban / Kuznetsov

Primary sponsor: VTB
Sponsors:
ALUTERRA
ASTEROS
CONCEPT
DORMA
HUNTER DOUGLAS CIS
OKALUX GmbH
TOP GLASS