Yesterday was the start of the 11th international Venice Biennale. The architecture exhibition entitled Out there: Architecture beyond building is intended, as the director Aaron Betsky points out, for addressing the central issues of our modern society.

Betsky offered the architects a chance to experiment in architecture since, in his words, architecture is not just buildings. So the architects were challenged with creating "installations, manifestos and utopian visions". With guidelines like this I must say I wasn't surprised by the large number of entries that are not (yet) applicable. Still, the jury was obviously impressed by the seemingly simple yet effective works.

Greg Lynn's Recycled Toys Furniture was awarded the Golden Lion for the Best Installation Project in the International Exhibition. His furniture reflects a witty aspect of ecology, recycling and consumerism, especially since we usually do not think of children and their seemingly innocent toys as pollutants.

Recycled Toys Furniture. Photo: La Biennale di Venezia

Poland convinced the jury with the Hotel Polonia: The Afterlife of Buildings project and won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. The idea behind the project is finding new purpose for old buildings – in a way, recycling them. In the Polish vision the old library becomes a shopping mall, a sanctuary is transformed into a water park, a business building becomes a lot for stonecutting etc. Truly "out there".

Sanctuary of Our Lady of Sorrows...

... and its "afterlife". Photos: www.labiennale.art.pl

And what about Slovenia? We participated with Ljubljana-Venice, New Urgency For Urban Politics project, designed by Ambient and Odprti krog architecture groups. The main idea is, in the words of project curator Janko Rožiè, removing the railway from the center of the city, thus freeing the land.

The project was actually conceived by Edvard Ravnikar in the 1950s, when he saw the solution of the railway's urbanistic problem (the railway blocks 10 streets and encompasses around 450.000 m2 of land) in directing the railway underground. That way the land in the city center is freed and the city's image can once again be shaped by architects, sculptors and other artists. In 1960s Ravnikar also applied this concept to Tronchetto area in Venice (pestered by a similar urbanistic problem) and won the tender, but the project was never realised.

Edvard Ravnikar's plans. Photo: MMC RTV SLO

The "Out there" exhibition certainly shows that there are a lot of creative minds out there. Still, we'll have to wait and see if the future truly holds a new level for architecture since the city management usually decides whether the architects' visions can be applied or simply remain utopian.

When I first entered the AA building I heard laughter, Natasha and Shuman – the summer school tutors as they made the roll call, mispronouncing some of the longer and strange sounding names. About 90 people from all proverbial sides of the world came to the summer school. Some of them young, barely out of middle school and interested in studying architecture and others older, 40 + years of age who wanted a change in their careers.

Not only students were from different cultures and different backgrounds, tutors too were practically everything but professors of architecture. Some of them were AA school graduates, some of them artists, others graphic designers, architects, musicians and fashion designers.

On first day we divided ourselves into 6 groups (units) working on different approaches to a common theme of our summer school – the future of cities and potential catastrophes.

So what did we do? From the description on the AA summer school website

Look out. Life is imitating art. What was once the domain of the disaster movie is fast becoming the real-life plot of our collective futures. From The Day After Tomorrow (eco-Armageddon) to I Am Legend (man-made viral pandemic); cities have become the ticking-time bombs of tomorrow. This year, the AA’s Summer Architecture School will focus on the forces—social, economic, ecological, technical—that might potentially conspire to bring about the city’s—and the world’s—end. Using London as an experimental laboratory of ideas and hypotheses, we will yield unexpected discoveries and innovative proposals. As more and more people move to cities than ever before, a figure that is set to rise to 70% of the global population in just 40 years time, what are the imminent and long-term emergency scenarios, and how might we either avert or design away the disasters? The brief, intense course—based on the renowned AA Unit System—emphasises techniques of interpretation, recording, drawing, making and thinking through diverse media types, both analogue and digital.

The pavillion in front of the AA, made by the students

The second pavillion in front of the school

... continued next week

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Jelena Grujiæ is the winner of the 2007 Trimo Urban Crash competition.

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