Though we haven’t built a stile for visitors to the Pavilion to climb over the Giardini fence, instead, in a law-abiding way the pavilion reaches beyond the building line – the Pavilion as a means to explore the city – and have contrived ways for the city in its turn to breach the Giardini boundary.
Muf has a standing preoccupation with the temporary as a mode of reflection on the fixed. The temporary can be described as a test of the possible, a means to suspend disbelief and experience the risk of the unknown; an opportunity for the commitment-phobe to discover the value in what’s already there. As a masterplanning tool, the temporary is a means to introduce occupation into inert development sites and ensure that the fragile but desirable programmes of play, culture, the bucolic, the ‘off-menu’ (normally the first to be ‘value-engineered’ out of a project) are inscribed in the site and put into safekeeping pending a return to an alternative normality, once a vacant site has established a value around which development can be generated. This reverse form of masterplanning establishes strategy through detail: use is described through use. The Stadium of Close Looking itself, its bulk pressed into the Pavilion’s former palm court, is a 1:10 model of London’s Olympic Stadium repurposed for children’s drawing. It is also at one and the same time an invitation to look and an emblem of the value of looking – the value of starting by registering the assets you already have before making the next move. The Stadium of Close Looking plays out Katherine Shonfield’s equation detail / strategy = Detail, and is thus a mode of reflecting critically on existing models of masterplanning – how can detail can inform strategy? What is the relationship between largescale, arms-length visions and proposals (which Venice attracts) and the value of close looking? The buckets of chalk in the Campo SS Giovanni e Paolo remind us that the whole city, which contains so few playgrounds, is itself a playground and a classroom. Venetian schools are currently dealing with the pressures of budget cuts. The Pavilion offers the extra of drawing lessons, thereby offering the thing which pressures on budgets has made missing. The British Pavilion can seem like a carefully maintained holiday home: each summer, cases are unpacked and packed again and the villa redecorated, leaving no trace of occupation. Our collaborations have each made things which not only have a life beyond the Pavilion but will have an afterlife beyond the Biennale, Wolfgang Scheppe in the piece of work made for the pavilion, a body of research concluding in the Done.Book, book sculpture makes this explicit. So the pavilion plays host to scientific and public meetings on the future of the lagoon and to a section of live saltmarsh, ensuring that the subject under discussion is present in the building, its tidal activity replicated by pumps
Public space is always contested space So we did treat the invitation as an opportunity for another muf project, process-driven, speeded up to fit the Biennale timetable, and not for the representation of a muf project. As such we don’t at this stage know how it will turn out. It is a public space project in that it attempts to make the Pavilion more public, to maintain in parallel different uses of it in such a way that they can coexist with one another rather than flatten one another, and so demonstrate that public space can be a platform for more than one agenda at a time. There is always contrivance in any participative project. We began with two seemingly very different organisations, the British Committee for the Preservation of Venice and Rebiennale. But both are similarly concerned with the fragile ecologies of the city, as are all the other collaborators who have been gathered together (including Ruskin). The unexhibited project is the process of trying to get it right: the making of relationships, the redeployment of budgets – Made in Venice (every object that was not brought with us from Britain) was financed by adding to the usual budget the allocations for shipping costs – the getting of permissions, the rocky path of collaboration itself, the establishing of what is missing in order that the thing proposed both fits the context and is sufficiently open-ended to allow future use after the designer has gone home. This process could describe any of the public realm projects in the studio just as well as it describes the period of our engagement with the Biennale. The certi ficate of authorization for moving the salt marsh in this catalogue is a clue as to what it involved. The Stadium of Close Looking Like Ruskin and those who went before and after him, we bring with us our own preoccupations, formed outside a Venetian context and, refashioned, will take them away again. Some of these are made explicit in the Stadium of Close Looking. At a moment when architecture in the UK and especially in London is less about building and more about what to do with inert sites and (with the exception of the Olympics) abandoned capital programmes, it is more important than ever to value what is there, before the plan, the masterplan, the strategic framework take hold.
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VILLA FRANKENSTEIN #1