Stepping into the Russian Pavilion at the 13th Venice International Architecture Biennale is a bit like travelling in a space caspule or feeling as if you were standing inside a building from a distant future in which the vast and almost infinite space surrrouding you is actually full of amazing content hidden behind QR codes. Who knows, if somebody would ever do a remake of Aelita, maybe this is what the film set would look like.
Indeed, while one floor of the pavilion allows visitors to rediscover through lenses the architecture of 60 closed science towns built during the Soviet Union (from 1945 to 1989), the first floor is a spaceship-like environment. Visitors are given at the entrance a tablet computer and, pointing it towards the pavilion walls, they can access to the projects for Skolkovo, Russia’s futuristic city dedicated to science.
The project creates a great contrast between the science cities from Soviet Times where people worked isolated from society and, in some cases, under secret identities, and the "Common Ground" on the first floor created by covering with QR codes the ceilings and the walls of the pavilion, an idea proposed by Grigory Revzin and Konstantin Chernozatonskiy (and replicated also for the press pack that came in the form of a pin with a picture of a QR code).
The first impact is already pretty shocking, but the second one, with technology immediately transporting visitors to another place, a futuristic "i-city/i-land" (this is the title of the pavilion) to explore Skolkovo, is even more intriguing.
Scheduled to open in 2017 near Moscow and supported by a star(architect)-studded team of Russian and foreign architects including Pierre de Meuron, Rem Koolhaas, Kazuyo Sejima, Mohsen Mostafavi, Sergei Tchoban, Sergey Kuznetsov, Venice Architecture Biennale’s director David Chipperfield, Yury Grigoryan, and Steano Boeri, the Skolkovo science and technology centre will bring together 500 companies and firms with physicists, engineers and computer scientists working alongside in different fields, from IT to biomedical and nuclear research, energy, and space technology, and will also boast a university and homes, so it will be radically different from the first Soviet science cities.
Curated by Sergei Tchoban with deputy curators Sergey Kuznetsov (of architectural bureau SPEECH Tchoban & Kuznetsov) and Valeria Kashirina, the pavilion - set to finding a way to connect via architecture the real with the virtual - gained for the first time in the history of this exhibition an award to Russia (the jury awarded to the pavilion a Special Mention).
While architecture-wise visitors will discover some exciting projects such as SANAA's Kazuyo Sejima and Ryuue Nishizawa's thin glass "Dome" and Oma's Rem Koolhaas and Reinier de Graaf's "Rock", the format of this pavilion actually opens new possibilities also for other disciplines. Such a format - QR codes and tablet computers - could be applied not only to art or architecture, but also to fashion events.
It would indeed be much cheaper than organising a proper catwalk show or a presentation to offer the buyers and the press a sort of virtual lookbook that, opening via a QR code, could unlock information on materials, colours, inspirations and so on.
As we wait to see if any artists or fashion designers will ever opt for this format for other projects, people interested in science or in developing and carrying forward the science and fashion discourse can in the meantime start dreaming about what Skolkovo will look like in 2017.
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Comments