Trolling around the 13th Venice Biennial of Architecture

This phrase from the Belgian Pavilion in Venice, curated by AWJGGRAUaDVVTAT, perhaps best sums up the current architectural affairs. Architecture has a mission, and it has to somehow be related to economics. 

 "No More Play" could have been a better title for this edition of Venice, rather than Common Ground. No more fancy starchitecture, no more "look at me" buildings, maybe no more buildings at all.


Herzog and deMeuron must have missed the phonecall from Venice, and insisted on presenting their latest and fanciest, of course in typically fantastic objects and clever presentation through newspaper articles. I think it was some kind of concert hall.

 Valerio Olgiati gave good proportions to a rather banal idea, of the common ground of references shared between architects. (Here I was thinking that architects nowadays scrolled through their references like thumbnails in a valley of jpgs.


San Rocco had the prettiest display of them all, a table full of interesting looking models, super clever and diverse, objects that blurred the line between found and designed, just as it should be. Oh and it was something to do with collaborations.






Dubai had a catalogue to give away and large arch projections of desert beach landscapes, easy on the eyes.


Chile was all about a salt mining town somehow destroyed by it's own economy, I think. I have the catalogue, promise to check.


5 young architects bought a house in Detroit for $500! then they proceeded to do their thing in the house, creating a collage in progress, in which they lived and work in.

 Over at the Italia (central) pavilion a rather out of the blue Piranesi project.

 MVRDV had a clever "farmville" type proposal but with spectacularly out of date graphics. Somebody fell asleep on their Windows 95

REM on the other hand was spot on as usual, with a re-evaluation of 8 post-war public sector architects, in a cool photomural installation. Would have been nice to have a take on these buildings, rather than just a look.

Somewhere in the central pavilion, a treasure trove of casabella and domus archives, not scanned but in real life paper, complete with yellowing ads and articles that never made it to the compendiums and anniversary editions. 

If only I could have spent a week in there.

 Over at the Spanish pavilion, Enric Ruiz Geli's Cloud 9 posse presented their very funky El Bulli foundation. I wonder if the resemblance to Pizza Hut is accidental, or?

 elsewhere at the spanish, some techie green stuff (wait, wasn't this two biennials ago?)

One of my total favorites was Israel, which began as a museum-shop type of installation, where you could buy Yasser Arafat toy figures and little Bible notepads and cute 3D prints of oil barrels. Walking up, each of the objects assumed their position in the narrative of how Israel and all it's problems and conflicts came to be.

including a hard look at orthodox settlers and all. Somehow the combination of ultra-pop museum shop and hardcore politics seems like a very current take on the state of the world.

USA pavilion was all about urban activism and grass roots solutions to local problems, a manual for running your city. 

Nordic Pavilion was more or less a collection of worldwide architectural cliches re-performed by local architects, and I dont mean this in a good way. The little bunny had to close it's eyes.

Japan had an ace pavilion as usual, with Toyo Ito organizing his younger disciples in a effort to provide architecture to the Tsunami stricken areas.

the team, which included hot favourite Sou Fujimoto, did not sign their work, but anonymously contributed to a pool of great looking solutions (they also all looked the same).

houses that appeared to be made of fragments of houses combined with tree trunks.

stacks of roofs and flowerpots

and stairs and roof and flowerpots

and houses that look like rocks and flowerpots, though I couldnt help but think that people in a moment of distress just need an ISOBOX to call home. Nevertheless Japan was awesome as usual.

Another moment of grand coolness was the German Pavilion, where handsome and clever Kostantin Grcic installed a very MEMEoid space of large images with short text and these old looking rusted platforms.  "Oh these are the planks that Venice uses during Aqua Alta, we just borrowed them for the installation and will give them back in December. I didn't want to design an object for this, I prefer to use what exists." 

Those were perhaps the most contemporary words I heard during this trip.

on another level of coolness, Caruso St. John architects had their own Grindr profile trolling around Venice

Belgian Pavilion, as noted before, was all about how to reconfigure the EU into a sustainable business model, curated by AWJGGRAUaDVVTAT (I cannot stop saying this)

the presentation was a little dry

but when you notice the single family home stuck on the back of a supermarket chain, all acquired a new gravitas (or maybe this was just my reading).

Over at the Greek Pavilion, a clever hand-drawn model from AREA

bedrooms in the city describe it's population, and their means (deca)

Aristide Antonas presented a set of printouts and portfolios of recent work, cleverly reflecting the minimum budget given to participants (ouch)

our maximal to the point of illegibility contribution TROLLCASINO went way over budget Greek style, but we had fun making it, even if the subject was the current sad state of Athens.

TROLLCASINO and the proposal for a Cottage Economy Future, close-up

For our participation in MADEINATHENS at the Greek Pavilion in the 13^th Venice Biennial, We decided to study two iconic modernist buildings in Athens. Each of those buildings represents a side of the current two-fold crisis engulfing the city: The Civic side of the crisis is represented by the housing block Chara, and the Economic side by the luxury resort and casino of Mont Parnes.

The housing block, startlingly different from it's surrounding cheap and profit driven pseudo-modernist polykatoikies decides the city is no longer a friendly environment, and decides one day to leave, perhaps mirroring the immigrants who now leave Greece for their countries and the Greeks taking off in search of better fortunes elsewere. (Athens took it's current shape during a mass internal migration from the 1950s and onwards, when Greeks from every corner of the WWII and Greek Civil War ravaged country moved to Athens for jobs and modern comforts. This was followed by a wave of financial immigrants from Eastern Europe, North Africa and Asia that began in the 1990s.)

The video and installation narrates the story of the building, while going off in the theoretical future scenario of it's transformation into an inhabitable mountain.

The casino was built in the late 1950s with Marshall Plan funding, commisioned by the Karamanlis government. It was to be, like many Marshall Plan constructions, a perfect billboard for the future promised to all the NATO participating countries, a hi-tech modernist emblem positioned on top of mount Parnitha, visible from the entire city of Athens, and who knows maybe even from Moscow? The building was also heavily used to promote the Greek Economy and Tourism forces to consider in the European landscape, and perhaps part of Karamanlis plan of Greece as a valid European partner.

Things did not exactly turn out like this, and the luxury resort proved to be a shaky gamble, criticized by many as a mediocre, poorly planned building. The rooms were too small for a mountain resort, the pool reminded one of a beach side fancy but was too windy and cold for anybody to use, the public spaces of the hotel were hard to navigate and offered none of the spectacular views that the location promised. The hotel went quickly bankrupt, and began a steady decline of alternating bankruptcies, renovations and unsuccessful conversions into a school of tourism, a state casino, a privately owned hotel and recently a half demolished ruin about to be re-built as a copy of it's previous self. Between these failed attempts to revive the building came earthquakes, fires and structural failures just adding to the list problems for this unlucky building. More than a capitalist gamble gone wrong, it seems as if the mountain itself was rejecting it's modernist occupant, as if constructing this building on top of this nature reserve was a perfect example of hybris.

At the same time, the counties economy underwent a similar series of failed renovations, seemingly unable to follow the course of capitalism, as it evolved from a cold-war political game of domination to the casino capitalism of financial markets, and to today's crisis capitalism.

In the end, the building that was meant as a billboard for the strength of the economy became an emblem of it's failures, inhabiting the peak of the current economic warzone.

The project researches this history, but takes a sharp turn into a future where the development of a cottage economy follows the fantasy solution of a midnight explosion. The broken pieces of the exploded casino scatter on the slopes of Mount Parnitha and slowly grow into small shelters, the modernist fragments helped into completion by the tree trunks of Parnitha, hybrid cottages that escape into a future of locally grown independed economies.

TROLLCASINO
Andreas Angelidakis 2010-2012

3D and Animation: Sotiris Vasiliou

additional work for TROLL: Dimitris Silaidos, Nana Stathi, Georgios Eftaxiopoulos, Eirini Anthouli.
addtional 3D for CASINO: Diamadis Tegelidis
photediting Alexandra Syriou

video editing AA
installation: Sotiris Vasiliou, Alexandra Syriou, AA

TROLLCASINO at the 13th Venice Biennial

TROLLCASINO is the joined story of two modernist buildings in Athens, that is part of MADE in ATHENS, curated by Panos Dragonas and Anna Skiada, the Greek Pavilion at the 13th Venice Biennial of Architecture.
the stories of the two are presented as installations, each a collage of plywood frames, containing prints and videos and objects and facts and a lot of fiction too

 

each story is a short film too, presented in fragments, inside small screens

Troll or the Voluntary Ruin is the story of a rare example of high quality modernism in a low income area of Athens

in the video, the building reaches a point where it can no longer tolerate it's surroundings. The typical Athenian polykatoikia (apartment building) was a cheap version of Corbusier's 5 points of architecture, all shifted and tweaked to provide the contractor and the owner maximum profit and floor area at minimum cost. 

Our heroine Chara (Joy) as the building was nicknamed, decides one day to become a mountain instead of a building

she collects energy from plants, cars, protests and people

and heads off for the countryside

the video is an opportunity to take a look at the current situation in Athens, a city that today seems the perfect performer of it's deep civic and financial crisis. Chara wants to leave all this behind.

Greediness on both the individual and government level has been perhaps the key factor in shaping the city of Athens. Political circumstance might come a close second. The project attempts a close look at the reality of the city through a fictional scenario that hints at possible architecture without actually proposing a built structure. 

Chara voluntarily becomes a ruin in order to position herself in a field of questions, leaving for the mountains to collect her thoughts about the city and its architectures.

On top of a mountain we find another modernist icon, the luxury resort and casino of Mont Parnes

the resort offers magnificent views of a city sinking in crisis, where the only thing ever advertised is online casinos

the resort had been built in the 1960s with Marshall Plan funding, 

the idea was that it would advertise the country as a successful proponent of all things U.S.A., a basic technique of the era's cold war politics 

modernist hi-tech architecture and strong, booming economy.

it did not turn out exactly like that. The resort was unlucky, a failed investment that seems to go bankrupt every 5 years.

it got endlessly renovated and rebranded as a casino, a school for tourism, a resort, a casino again

meanwhile casino capitalism was becoming the norm in financial markets

Could it be that the mountain was rejecting the luxury resort?

fact becomes fiction and one night the inevitable explosion takes place 

Bad luck continued, bankruptcies were followed by earthquakes and fires, structural problems and a major financial crisis.

Suddenly the modernist building has accidentally fulfilled it's original purpose, to represent the economy. Only it is a story of continuing failure, misjudged attempts at renovation and constant gambling.

the project attempts to look at the building for another perspective, that of the billboard building, the roadside duck that has no content apart from what its there to advertise. A mountain of questions about the nature of modernism, and what we might call post-modern,

an attempt to piece together an architecture that understands the complexity of casino capitalism, knows how to navigate the jungle of spreads, jump over the ravines of expired bonds and other market abstractions.

could there be such an architecture, 

and would it know how to survive on a mountain?

after the explosion the mountain calms down, and we find the fragments of the casino have become shelters

could a collage between a mountain shelter (a traditional Hütte ) and the modernist shards, provide some closure to the story? Buildings unplugged from the power grid, off the financial network, buildings that decides to leave everything behind.

TROLLCASINO
Andreas Angelidakis 2010-2012

3D and Animation: Sotiris Vasiliou

additional work for TROLL: Dimitris Silaidos, Nana Stathi, Georgios Eftaxiopoulos, Eirini Anthouli.
addtional 3D for CASINO: Diamadis Tegelidis
photediting Alexandra Syriou

video editing AA
installation: Sotiris Vasiliou, Alexandra Syriou, AA