Different architects approached in radically different ways the main theme - Common Ground - of the 13th Venice Architecture International Biennale. Some of them looked at the history of architecture; others explored the possibilities offered by public spaces in a city, employed as "common" or "shared" ground by the people living in them. Architect Norman Foster, artist Charles Sandison and film director Carlos Carcas developed instead the theme through projection and sound in a visual installation entitled "Gateway".
One of the main rooms of the Arsenale was turned into a black box: in Sandison's animated word art text names of architects and people who from antiquity to the present have influenced the design of our cities and buildings run across the floor like techno-ants, while still images sourced from a global network of architects, planners, photographers and crtitics, edited and combined together, form precise sequences projected on the walls.
The images create moving mosaics, "human tiles" chronicling a journey through the world, merging booming new cities and favelas from South America and Asia with historic spaces of the Western world such as museums, stadia and other public buildings, all illustrating the "Common Ground" theme and all hinting also at upheaval, social change and social unrest.
While the main point of the installation is presenting architectural culture and making connections between sources and architects with the images of countries and buildings projected on the walls, the sub-themes portrayed in the pictures and in particular issues documenting social change, order and disorder (including the Arab Spring and the London riots) are very relevant and at times also poignant.
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