Visitors to extensive exhibitions such as the Venice Architecture Biennale know that at some point of their tours, they will have to get away from everything and spot a quiet place where they can think, ponder or simply rest. One ideal place to do so during this edition of the Biennale is the Taiwan Pavilion inside the Palazzo delle Prigioni, just a few minutes from St Mark's Square.
The curator of the Pavilion, Jimenez Lai, founder of Bureau Spectacular, devised the space as a temporary oasis populated with small private houses.
The structures will maybe look to many Italians like hybrid-style buildings, crossovers between Superstudio's interior design pieces and the objects created by the Memphis Milano movement, but the installation has got strong connections with the Taiwanese urban environments.
Entitled "Township of Domestic Parts: Made in Taiwan", Lai's installation consists in nine small houses, each one embodying a different domestic program.
Upon stepping into the Palazzo, visitors encounter the Garden of Earthly Delights, a green post-modernist structure inspired by several houses including Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, and the House of Sleep, a building suspended and detached from the ground that hints at private spaces and creates a "Romeo and Juliet" effect.
The House of Social Dining, a space regulated by geometry in which the circle calls to mind Taiwanese outdoor banquets and the urbanism generated by several circular tables located one next to the other, occupies the centre of the main room.
The latter also features the House of Pleasure, a striped scale model of a castle representing a sort of large sofa-scape ideal for relaxing purposes, and the House of Study, a structure that references the strict examination system that high school students go through in Taiwanese culture, and that symbolically represents a preparation space, a room of uncertainties and an incubator towards better times.
This space also includes a screen on which images of floor plans of different houses and buildings are projected.
The second room features structures that hint at family, society and human relationships: the House of Shit represents a bathroom seen as a fortress of solitude, a room where, quite often, people retire not to use the toilet (recreated in a double version inside the small house - View this photo), but to remain alone, and therefore a space conceived as a sanctuary for the individual.
The House of Alchemy evokes the traditional Taiwanese kitchen seen as a social connector, a place for mixing ingredients and interacting with other human beings; the Altar of Appearance references the shrines to ancestors featured in many Taiwanese houses, but ironically hints also at those living rooms that look like vitrines rather than functioning and functional rooms, with objects, photographs and assorted trinkets on display fossilised in times and space.
The House of Work completes the installation: this structure resembling a clock tower hides inside a series of framed images and certificates, so it is a condensed representation of what may be contained in an office, it encapsulates the work spaces, symbolising personal accomplishments.
The friendly and rather surreal buildings in delicate pastel shades or vividly bright colours were directly inspired by the main theme of the Biennale, "Fundamentals" and by the "Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014" brief given to the National Pavilions.
The small houses reference indeed the scarcity of land and the conflicting urban planning in Taiwan with quite a few residents opting to gain extra space by building illegal structures and additions ("weijian") on rooftops (that end up looking like hats on buildings...) regardless of aesthetics and safety, while also hinting at the Taiwanese city streets filled with buildings inspired by various architectural styles.
Ultimately, the houses also remind of the temporary structures scattered along the Taiwanese streets that host housing showrooms for real-estate developers and that could be considered as the most avant-garde creations on the island.
There are also more specific references behind this installation: while designing these small houses that can actually be populated by the visitors, the curator kept firmly in mind the Barcelona Pavilion designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, Spain, (conceived as "an ideal zone of tranquillity" for the tired visitor), but also by a series of further buildings such as Vanna Venturi House, Casa Malaparte, SANAA's Moriyama House and Philip Johnson's Glass House.
Lai was also influenced by the collaged assemblages of houses by Richard Hamilton, so the installation has got a sort of arty twist about it, though it could be seen at the same time as a surreal attempt at creating fun interior pieces.
Indeed, even though the buildings look like free-standing structures, they aren't big enough to be considered as architecture and they are too large to be pieces of furniture, this is why the curator describes them also as "Superfurniture".
Taiwan started participating in the Architecture Exhibition in 2000, this is therefore its eight engagement and an interesting attempt at bridging different cultures and architectural environments while providing a temporary space where visitors can rest their body and mind.
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