Venice: UK Pavilion

Architizer News

Venice: UK Pavilion

September 2, 2010

While most countries design their pavilions as insular bubbles, celebrating the achievements of its own architects, this year, the UK curators, muf architecture/art, tabled that particular tradition.

Instead, they use the project, “which they call Villa Frankenstein,” as a way to generate a dialogue between the UK and Venice. Clue No. 1: the constructed lagoon out back. Along the length of the back terrace, muf included what they call a working salt marsh. Inside, in the back room, an exquisite mapping of the Venice lagoon fills the length of an entire wall, and birds, on loan from the Natural History Museum in Venice, animate the space.

In the front room, a hand-crafted wooden bleacher, oriented to the front door, fills the interior volume. This “Stadium of Close Looking” (which happens to be a 1:10 model of the London 2012 Olympic Stadium) accommodates drawing classes for local school children along with Biennale-related lectures, but it also visually emphasizes the relationship the curators hope to establish, since muf uses it to set up a framed view of the Biennale’s Giardini.

The Lagoon at the UK Pavilion. Photo by John Gendall.

The scaled-down stadium inside the UK Pavilion. Photo by John Gendall.

To further develop the UK-Venice relationship, the curators hired Venentian carpenter Spazio Legno to build the installation, and, once the Biennale packs up, the bleacher will be disassembled and reinstalled somewhere in Venice. This effort will be carried out by ReBiennale, a local arts group that fabricates its work using detritus from old Biennales.

Photo by John Gendall.

In the two smaller galleries behind the main room, the curators show photographs by local Venetians from a half-century ago, along with drawings from the archives of John Ruskin, the English architecture critic who famously penned Stones of Venice.

Villa Frankenstein was commissioned by Vicky Richardson, Director of Architecture, Design, and Fashion at the British Council. “Villa Frankenstein,” she says, “shifts our perception of Venice as a historic backdrop to the Biennale, to one of a dynamic participant.”