Architecture News

Projects for the People at the U.S. Pavilion in Venice

<p><strong>HabitatMap</strong></p><p><strong><em>Air Casting</em></strong></p><p><strong>(New York, 2010)</strong></p><p>AirCasting is a platform for recording, mapping, and sharing environmental data — Projects for the People at the U.S. Pavilion in Venice
**HabitatMap**
***Air Casting***
**(New York, 2010)**
AirCasting is a platform for recording, mapping, and sharing environmental data using smart phone technology. Aimed at enhancing the impact of community voices on building greener cities, users can upload local measurements of sound, temperature, humidity, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen dioxide, and share their data with a worldwide community via the AirCasting CrowdMap. It’s a project of HabitatMap, a New York nonprofit devoted to environmental health justice.
Photo courtesy of HabitatMap

<p><strong>WORKac</strong></p><p><em><strong>Edible Schoolyard, P.S. 216</strong></em></p><p><strong>(Brooklyn, 2011)</strong></p><p>For Alice Waters’ first Edible Schoolyard in New York, archit — Projects for the People at the U.S. Pavilion in Venice
**WORKac**
**Edible Schoolyard, P.S. 216**
**(Brooklyn, 2011)**
For Alice Waters’ first Edible Schoolyard in New York, architecture firm WORKac created a place where students can grow, prepare, and enjoy meals together at Brooklyn’s P.S. 216. WORKac’s marriage of agriculture and the urban environment is made up of interlinking systems that produce energy and heat, collect rainwater, process compost and waste. The project features a retractable greenhouse that extends the growing season by sliding over 1600 square feet of soil during the winter months.
Photo © Raymond Adams

<em>Fresh Moves Mobile Market</em> is a one-aisle grocery store built in a retrofitted Chicago Transit Authority bus purchased for $1. Architecture for Humanity partnered with the Chicago nonprofit — Projects for the People at the U.S. Pavilion in Venice
*Fresh Moves Mobile Market* is a one-aisle grocery store built in a retrofitted Chicago Transit Authority bus purchased for $1. Architecture for Humanity partnered with the Chicago nonprofit Food Desert Action to design the bus, which brings fresh produce to the 500,000 Chicago residents living in food deserts. Fresh Moves’ website lists its hourly schedule, and not only sells produce but offers classes on cooking and healthy diets.
Photo courtesy of Architecture for Humanity Chicago

<p><strong>Rob Walker (with contributions by Candy Chang)</strong></p><p><strong>Hypothetical Development Organization</strong></p><p><strong>(New Orleans, 2010)</strong></p><p>The Hypothetical Develo — Projects for the People at the U.S. Pavilion in Venice
**Rob Walker (with contributions by Candy Chang)**
**Hypothetical Development Organization**
**(New Orleans, 2010)**
The Hypothetical Development Organization creates a new form of urban storytelling. Members of this organization examine the city for compelling structures that have fallen into disuse. H.D.O. invents a hypothetical future for each selected structure, a future that isn’t necessarily bound by practicality or reality. The organization then creates convincing renderings of these imagined uses, and prints them onto large signs to be shared with the public.
Image courtesy Dave Pinter

Leasing an empty site from the city, San Francisco firm Envelope a+d's <em>Proxy </em>redeveloped two large lots to become a kind of urban living room, with food stands, a temporary art gallery, a bee — Projects for the People at the U.S. Pavilion in Venice
Leasing an empty site from the city, San Francisco firm Envelope a+d's *Proxy* redeveloped two large lots to become a kind of urban living room, with food stands, a temporary art gallery, a beer garden, and an area for food trucks.
Photo courtesy of Envelope a+d

<p><strong>Jason Roberts and Andrew Howard</strong></p><p><em><strong>Better Block Project</strong></em></p><p><strong>(Dallas, 2010; now in other US cities)</strong></p><p>Better Block is an open-sou — Projects for the People at the U.S. Pavilion in Venice
**Jason Roberts and Andrew Howard**
**Better Block Project**
**(Dallas, 2010; now in other US cities)**
Better Block is an open-source demonstration tool that founders Jason Roberts and Andrew Howard call “a living charrette.” Better Block organizes a team of volunteers, who virtually overnight, temporarily transform a drab or problematic street into a “better block,” with urban design features, such as bike lanes, sidewalk cafes, trees, and other amenities, showing the potential to create a revitalized and vibrant neighborhood. The exercise inspires communities to actively engage in the build-out process of their own neighborhoods. City officials now regard Better Block as a potential economic development tool.
Photo © Jason Roberts

Leasing an empty site from the city, San Francisco firm Envelope a+d's Proxy redeveloped two large lots to become a kind of urban living room, with food stands, a temporary art gallery, a beer garden, and an area for food trucks.

With a little more than a month before the opening of the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale, firms around the world are finalizing contributions to the massive show, a grab bag of architecture and architecture-related exhibitions that will run from August 27 though November 25. As usual, there will be an “official” exhibition, this time curated by the British starchitect David Chipperfield, with the title Common Ground, and 55 separate national displays (with Angola, Kosovo, Kuwait, and Peru joining 51 returning countries).

Many of those national displays are government-supported, but in the U.S., the majority of funding must be raised privately. Cathy Lang Ho, the freelance writer and editor who is serving as U.S. commissioner, said it’s both a disadvantage that the government isn’t more forthcoming (the State Department puts up a bare $100,000), but also an advantage, since she had free rein to create an exhibition without Washington’s imprimatur.

What she has chosen to do with that freedom is display 124 architect-initiated projects that in most cases lack clients or budgets of more than a few hundred dollars. Grouped under the headline Spontaneous Interventions, they include guerrilla bike lanes, spray-painted at night; a pavilion in San Francisco where visitors eat soup while waiting for soil samples from their yards to be tested; and a mobile produce market meant to serve urban “food deserts.” While all the projects had to have been previously realized, few of them are buildings, and some are apps and websites.

Given economic conditions in the United States, “a show about high-end architecture for a very small group of people would not be the right thing right now,” says Ho. “the projects are about asserting democracy—which is what’s happening in architecture and design right now.”

To choose the projects, from among 450 entries, Ho worked with the Institute for Urban Design and a group of advisors led by the Institute’s board chair (and longtime Record contributor) Michael Sorkin. The projects will be shown on banners, which visitors will be asked to unfurl. With everyone at the Biennale “on information overload, it was important for the exhibition to be strong experientially,” Ho says. Freecell, a Brooklyn studio, designed the installation of the banners, and Interboro, a Brooklyn firm known for its P.S.1/MoMA Young Architect’s Program installation last year, designed a lounge outside the neoclassical U.S. pavilion. Is this the Grand Canal or Grand Army Plaza?

Many American architects will also be represented under the Common Ground umbrella. Chipperfield, who was appointed only last December 27, announced a theme that, like all good Biennale themes, can mean almost anything participants want it to mean. Common Ground, he has said, reference both new models for shared space, and “the ideas we all share about architecture.” Chipperfield tapped 63 people (including architects as well as horticulturalist Piet Oudoulf and photographer Thomas Struth) to help curate the show. Kenneth Frampton, the Columbia University architectural theorist, will present work by Steven Holl, Patkau Architects, Rick Joy, Shim/Sutcliffe, and Stanley Saitowitz. Peter Eisenman, also tapped by Chipperfield, is working with students at Yale to adapt Piranesi’s Campo Marzio drawing into a digital 3-D model. And Tod Williams and Billie Tsien sent empty wooden boxes to 35 people, asking them to fill the containers with “things that inspired them,” Tsien says. (Eisenman received one of the boxes and is filling it with a grid.)

Among the national pavilions, standouts are likely to include Portugal’s display, with works by its two Pritzker Prize winners, Alvaro Siza and Eduardo Soto de Moura, and Japan’s, where commissioner Toyo Ito will present works by up-and-comers, such as Sou Fujimoto and Kimiko Inui.

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