Walls You Can Live In and Floors That Surprise: Brash New Theories of Architecture at the Venice Biennale

By JENNIFER K. RUARK

Arabella Schwartzkopf The "Airport Condenser," as seen from the other side of "Performance Architecture," a hybrid of real and virtual space

If you ignore the tourists in their resort wear and shut out the hum of the water taxis, you can easily imagine this city centuries ago. On a hot June day, the famous Venetian light burnishes the churches and stucco villas. It bounces off the canals, where small boats carrying produce from the mainland wend their way past quiet gondolas and under clotheslines swaying with faded blouses. Approaching the Giardini Publicci, where the city is hosting the Seventh International Architecture Exhibit of the Venice Biennale, the crowds thin. The loudest sound is birdsong from sycamores that arch over the broad gravel paths approaching the United States pavilion. It is a neoclassical building, domed, symmetrical, and stately.

Step inside, though, and you enter the future.

The west wing of the building has been given over to a cacophony of electric light, color, and sound. Young exhibitors from Columbia University, dressed in black from head to toe, stare intently at a bank of computers. In one corner, a web of luminescent turquoise wires juts out from a screen projection of a computer matrix that constantly rotates, collapses, and expands. From somewhere, a chorus of otherworldly voices rises and falls. Walk down a ramp in a silver nylon tunnel, and hear the roar of a jet engine, an announcement bell, an intermittent thunk. Around you, more images spin and warp. Are you in some futuristic airport, or on the airplane itself?

Continue through the domed rotunda where video screens display talking heads and into the other wing of the building. Here, it is quieter, sunnier. This area, claimed by students from the University of California at Los Angeles, seems to be a sculpture exhibit, but the sculptures are models of where you might live someday. In one area, a scarlet cavity has been scooped out of a wooden cube the size of a small oven. Inside, a silvery-pink sphere, its surface pleated, squats on the undulated floor. Sitting on a mirrored table, another piece looks like an upturned paw, with eight long, wooden claws.

Beyond a second bank of computers operated by students, just before you exit, you pass a milling machine that carves up slabs of wood into intricate forms with rapid precision, like a whittler on speed.

You have arrived at the cutting edge of architecture.

U.C.L.A. The computerized milling machine can cut complex, curved forms fast enough to make infinite variations economically feasible.

In the 1980's, computers began to replace drafting tables as the places where buildings were dreamed up and designed. They are everywhere at the Biennale, which opened in June and runs through October 29. But at the U.S. pavilion, computers are doing more than rendering 3-D blueprints. The emerging generation of architects represented here uses animation software to study the effects of natural forces on different forms, and film- and Web software to produce virtual environments and atmospheric effects. Moreover, they say, they are among the first architects to respond to the way that digital technologies have altered people's aesthetics, even their very sense of space.

"Architecture is in an incredibly interesting transition at the moment," says Hani Rashid, an adjunct professor at Columbia University and a partner in Asymptote, a "paperless" New York City architecture firm. "The convergence of academic study and practice ... has come of age."

To emphasize that generational shift, Max Hollein, U.S. commissioner for the Biennale and son of the Austrian architect Hans Hollein, selected graduate students rather than established architects to represent the country -- an unprecedented act for this prestigious festival. Instead of exhibiting finished designs, teams from Columbia, led by Mr. Rashid, and U.C.L.A., led by Greg Lynn, a studio professor there and like Mr. Rashid a rising star, spent five weeks at the Biennale participating in an "architecture laboratory." There they showed not only their projects but the process of creating them. The professors held seminars in the exhibit hall, even as the models changed, and visitors from different fields came to give lectures and critiques.

"I felt it might be interesting to use the Biennale as some sort of breeding ground, a working space," says Mr. Hollein, who is manager of European relations for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. "A space where we preview and not review."

An interesting premise, but has this brash brand of architecture paid off? The students have packed up and headed home. But their projects, which remain on display in Venice, continue to raise eyebrows. "It's always risky showing student projects," says Mr. Lynn.

Arabella Schwartzkopf A model of the "X-Ray Wall System" shows how a wall could morph into a chair.

The experimental nature of the exhibit is especially apparent on the Columbia side of the pavilion, for the projects there are not imagined structures but "gestures," as the students like to say, toward an idea.

Take the web of light. Called "Performance Architecture," the hybrid of wire and image is meant as a meditation on the realness of cyberspace, an effort to bring virtual reality into the physical realm. As the students explain it, the lighted-wire structure is a tangible version of the computer matrix the students have generated. Although it delineates an actual space, the shadows it casts on the screen behind it, combined with the morphing computer matrix on that screen, produce an enigmatic, elusive whole.

"It blurs the distinction between real space and virtual space," says Dragana Zoric, a member of the team that created it. "What happens in between? And what does it imply about the way we should be doing architecture? Does it imply anything?"

Good question, and one that the students say they can't answer. They have come up with another name for their project, though: "Data Flux Response Architecture."

Eventually, they imagine, people anywhere could log onto the Internet and alter the backdrop of the wire web by entering data of their own choosing. The code that creates the shifting matrix could be a mathematical abstraction of just about anything: from the repetition of motifs and proportions in a real building to changes in the world economy.

"We're not really interested in any static representation or final product as we are in this thing that's always in flux," says another team member, Jason Tax.

Flux is also the theme of the nylon-mesh tunnel. Dubbed the "Airport Condenser," it was constructed as a response to what Mr. Rashid calls the "strange urbanism" of airports, "nonplaces" that exist only to move people from one city to another. And so, like an airport, the Condenser is transformed by the people passing through it: Stepping on sensors in the floor triggers airport noises and images -- including the Calvin Klein perfume bottles in a duty-free shop -- projected on the tunnel walls. The students haven't imagined an eventual use for this structure, either, but they say there needn't be one.

Columbia U. A computer rendering of the Columbia University team's "Airport Condenser"

"What we build is like a canvas to study the possibilities of interactivity in architecture," says Laura Evia Hernandez, a team member. Architecture is no longer a fixed ideal created by a master artist, but a team project with endless possibilities. "We completely relinquish responsibility," said Mr. Rashid. "That's the whole point."

A mutable architecture shaped largely by the people who use it. The U.C.L.A. students, too, dream of that -- but they have gone so far as to design actual structures. Their work, represented at the Biennale by the sculptures in the pavilion's east wing, is meant as part of the Embryologic House, a cavernous, almond-shaped structure conceived by Mr. Lynn. In contrast to the austere, rectilinear Modern buildings -- in the tradition of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe -- and the stark interiors that have recently come back into fashion, the Embryologic House is designed as an organism. Blurring the distinction between outside and inside, its surface folds and wrinkles to create nooks, shelving, or even furniture; thins to let in light; and tears and indents to create windows and doors.

Thanks to digital technology, however, it's an organism that could be mass-produced in a factory -- a "biomorphic manufactured house." The computerized milling machine, featured in the pavilion and used widely in the aerospace and automobile industries, can cut complex, curved surfaces very quickly and make endless variations on a theme. Using that machine, Mr. Lynn and his students want to import the contemporary "aesthetics of the curve" -- think not only of cars, but of iMacs, of Nikes, and other industrial products -- into architecture.

"If you look at the domestic landscape of America," says Mr. Lynn, "architecture is always supposed to be the background or the frame, to all of the other industrial-design fields. So people will follow car design, they'll follow graphic design, but then they'll go back home to a comfortable, Cape Cod house. And then flip on the TV and go back into that other world."

"We say, well, instead of trying to design your average house, let's try to design a house which can participate in all these other fields, in a way that doesn't feel constrained by either the taste culture of High Modernism or the banal landscape of traditional housing."

U.C.L.A. A computer rendering of the "Shoe Floor"

In other words, why can't a house be more like a shoe?

Literally. One of the U.C.L.A. teams designed a floor resembling the sole of a running shoe stretched out as if it had melted in the sun. Translucent and elastic, it includes springy pods that might contain light fixtures. Another project, the X-ray Wall System, playing off the iMac, imagines walls and floors that would reveal a home's electric wiring and fiber-optic cables. Formed from a series of "fins" (the shapes that look like claws in one model), the project was also inspired by X-rays of shells. "A shell grows around itself, and it's constantly changing," explains Patrick McEneany, one of the wall system's designers. As with a shell, different colors and degrees of light would result from differing thicknesses in the translucent material, rather than from paint. A floor could begin to rise up and "evolve" into a seating area, twist to become a partition, and extend overhead as a support for the floor above. People living in the house would make up uses for different projections and indentations according to their immediate needs.

Such a design, the students believe, is more suited than the compartmentalized grid of most contemporary houses to the way people actually live. "You'll eat on the couch in front of the TV, you'll read in bed," says Mr. McEneany. "You don't necessarily follow the way the house is set up." With the computerized milling machine, new modifications could be produced every few months. Consumers could trade in their walls for custom-made modifications. "It's not meant to be an ideal that's copied forever," says Mr. McEneany. "Rather than trying to force a set paradigm on the domestic environment, we're gesturing that it could be more applicable" to our modern life.

Much the same thinking is behind the pink, pleated sphere, inspired by contemporary packaging and the garments of the fashion designer Issey Miyake. Called the "Soft Ball" because of the way animation software manipulated it to see how it would respond to sitting on the undulated floor, it is like an inhabitable wall, except spherical. Flat areas within it would make Mr. Lynn's floor livable, and the sphere would divide the large, open areas of the house, forming an enclosure or partition depending on where it was placed.

"This could become a kitchen space if you were wanting to, sort of, contain the quotidien smells or whatever that the kitchen traditionally implies," says Amanda Salud-Gallivan, one of the sphere's designers. Or not. Inexpensive and quickly produced, it could be moved, modified, and replaced at will.

Arabella Schwartzkopf Mark Taylor, a religion professor at Williams College, discusses the "Soft Ball" project with students from U.C.L.A.

Like the other designs for the Embryologic House, "Soft Ball" is organic. In contrast to a post-and-beam system, its seams are hidden and its structural load is dispersed over the entire surface, so that a change in one part results in changes across the entire form. The pleats strengthen it, allowing it to be made of thin, translucent materials. The texture, color, and shape are meant to produce a voluptuous, vital effect.

Indeed, although the Biennale's purported theme is "Less Aesthetics, More Ethics," the American students -- at least the ones from U.C.L.A. -- are more concerned with beauty than that would suggest. They may want to democratize architecture, embrace mass-production, or reconceive space, but they are unapologetic about their affection for light, color, and curve.

The distinction between ethics and aesthetics is specious anyway, says Mark Taylor, a professor of religion at Williams College who has written on architecture and was one of the critics invited to Venice as part of the workshop. In the Western tradition, he says, "the notion that art should transform life informs everything from the Bauhaus on. The aesthetic and the ethical are no longer oppositional."

Hence the Modernist association of clean, straight lines with rationality, stability, masculinity, and progress. But ever since Robert Venturi answered Mies van der Rohe's famous statement "Less is more" with the rejoinder "Less is a bore," postmodern architects have rejected the minimalist aesthetic. Their designs have been ironic, reappropriating the past as ornament and emphasizing fragmentation and eclecticism.

The generation of architects represented by Mr. Lynn, Mr. Rashid, and their students is trying to do something different. Like Frank Gehry and Peter Eisenman, they are influenced by deconstruction, and so are skeptical of binary oppositions like organic vs. mechanical, real vs. virtual -- even client vs. architect. But they are also greatly informed by theories of "network culture."

U.C.L.A. A computer rendering of the "X-Ray Wall System"

Theories like those of Mr. Taylor, who argues that we have left the postmodern moment and entered a "moment of complexity." He will publish a book on the subject next year. "Part of what's going on in the transition that we're undergoing now is a reconfiguration of the very spatiality of experience," says Mr. Taylor. "Space is morphing." The economy has become global; the Internet allows us to "go" to sites all over the world; and places like Times Square, with its electronic ticker tape and network-television studios, are a creation of image, media, and information as much as of bricks and mortar.

Even our bodies are composed of technology and information. Artificial limbs, artificial life, the Human Genome Project -- all are collapsing the distinction between machine and organism. "When my physiological and biological condition and perhaps your existence depend upon rewriting the genetic code, where's inside and where's outside?" Mr. Taylor asks. "Where's the technical and where's the biological?"

In the new architecture, he argues, those differences are not simply collapsed, but made permeable. "People like Eisenman and Gehry are increasingly using electronic technology to do their work, but in Greg and Hani's work, software in a certain sense becomes the architecture. The whole interplay between the so-called virtual and the so-called real gets complicated."

Mr. Rashid agrees. The poststructuralist and deconstructionist influences on architecture in the late 80's and early 90's "were to a great extent stylistic, and architectural practice was really only superficially inflected by these discourses," he writes in an e-mail message. Today, architecture students "are no longer detached from the actual, and are effectively exploring ways in which to radically change 'reality.' We no longer sit on the sidelines, quoting philosophers, cribbing artists, or fabricating utopias. Instead, the use of digital tools is compelling us to form structures, develop theory as application, and influence manufacturing and the actualization of space."

That wasn't apparent to all visitors to the Biennale. The New York Times called the Columbia projects "sexy but vapid," and The Times of London sneered at both wings of the pavilion: "Architecture students on computers can be found in colleges all over the world. They are no more interesting here."

Arabella Schwartzkopf Mark Taylor with U.C.L.A. students demonstrating the animation software that helps them create forms for the Embryologic House

"People asked, 'Is this just an exotic academic exercise?'" says Mr. Lynn. "It's clearly student work. It's all speculative at this point." But he's positive that at least the work his students are doing will appear "very, very soon in a lot of buildings."

Even Columbia's "Performance Architecture" could conceivably become a real building someday. In a seminar conducted in Venice, Mr. Rashid pressed the students to take the next step in that direction. Continuing to model the computer matrix on a one-to-one scale with a built structure, he said, "it's not a big stretch to imagine that at some point you could, in fact, compose a building or compose a space." One possibility, he suggested, would be to create "a space in which Venice was being performed," translating observations about, for example, the way light reflects off the magnificent facade of the 15th-century palace Ca d'Oro into data that could be used to alter the combined real-and-virtual building. "Before you know it, this structure could play a kind of game between a sort of rereading of the Venetian condition of light and architecture and this wire-frame architecture."

If people all over the world were interested enough to alter it, though, they could. Nothing is stable anyway -- why not make an architecture that points that out explicitly?

All that flux, that morphing, unnerved some visitors to the pavilion. Time and again, they had to be asked not to touch the wire model, which they seemed to want to fix in space. Walking back out into the real space and light of Venice, perhaps they headed toward Palladio's San Giorgio Maggiore, with its soothing harmonic proportions and gravitas. Here is an architecture of ideals, one made not for the moment but for all time. Maybe looking at it long enough, they could forget that, like all of Venice, it is sinking.

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