The end of December - because that's when we finished preparing the January issue - is the best time for all kinds of summaries. And like every year, we ask practitioners and architecture critics to write what they consider a success and what they consider a failure in a given year. We do it in the convention of Kits and Hits. We give our Authors and Authors total freedom of expression and exceptionally we do not moderate this discussion. We are simply very curious about it.
Malgorzata Kuciewicz and Simone De Iacobis on hits and putts in 2021
FromA&B issue 01|2022
HIT
support culture
The generational shift was widely described when covering last year's Olympics. At the Games, we saw solidarity on the part of female competitors (skateboarding), sharing a win with a fellow competitor (high jump competition), many acts of cooperation rather than just pressure for personal success. Cooperation instead of hard competition was also evident at last year's Venice Architecture Biennale. The extra time and dialogue forced by the pandemonium resulted in the Curators Collective initiative, which materialized in the exhibition space. The format of the Biennale is as anachronistic as the Olympics - countries send their representatives to win in a national competition. And this format has been criticized for years. At both events, many people represent their homelands by choice. Also competing in the Games, under the Olympic flag, is a team of people with fresh migration experiences. At the Biennale, national pavilions often present exhibitions prepared by international teams, because the key is the selection of content, not someone's background.
A case in point was the exhibition in the Belgian Pavilion, which was originally planned to present only "Composite Presence," a landscape made of architectural models of forty-five Belgian projects. Ready long before the opening, the exhibition was completed by curators from Bovenbouw Architectuur. Another forty-five people, but already from all over the world, were asked to submit their ideas about the urban landscape. The addendum took the very simple form of posted A3 prints. However, it defended itself thanks to the talents of the invitees and an extremely elegant idea. It referred to a "capriccio," or architectural caprice, a type of veduta realistically depicting urban fantasies, popular in Venice in the 18th century. One A3 prepared by the Polonia Pavilion curators proposes "View from the outside," a view of the city after calibrating the gaze on its territory. This proposal is arguably a continuation of the work on the Polish exhibition "Trouble in Paradise," where the PROLOG +1 collective, together with invited teams from different countries, presented the potential of the future from a non-urban perspective. Other manifestations of the "culture of support" in the Biennale space were the exchange of exhibits between representations, for example, of Japan and Russia, blurring the boundary between exhibitions, or the repair of paths between pavilions with cement made from brine - a new material presented at the exhibition "Wetland" of the United Arab Emirates (awarded the Golden Lion).
Curators Collective was formed during online working meetings of curators of this year's exhibitions. They discussed how to support the teams that will not make it this time or will open the exhibitions late. The awards were presented at the halfway point of the event, three months after the official opening date, and the ceremony was preceded by "Middisage," a three-day series of events organized grassroots just by Curators Collective. The activities of the Venice Biennale's first-ever curators' collective initiative resulted in panel discussions, exhibition presentations, book launches and walks. This time, there was no attempt to focus media attention on individual exhibitions, but on a collective reflection on the motto of the 2021 Architecture Biennale: "How will we live together?". The special atmosphere of that year offered a chance to look into the future. And in it, the Biennale is a meeting of communities in constant dialogue, not a stage of workaholics preaching about individual willpower and self-denial. Young people are pragmatic about networking and exchange. They would rather speak out repeatedly as part of a collective than take a "once in a lifetime opportunity." They will no longer give it to those who defined themselves through ruthless competition. Instead, they will support the voices close to them, even giving them a piece of their own space. In Venice, the culture of support is effectively supplanting the culture of splendor. As Paulo Mendes da Rocha used to say, "Venice is the capital of the imaginary world," and this one is already being invented by a new generation.
KIT
eco-marketing
Algorithms recently invited me to learn about "tools for building market advantage" and a lecture on "the impact of pandemics on the work ecosystem and office landscape." Really? So we are digitally connected by "ecosystem" and "landscape".
Many times in the past year I have read announcements with a particularly acerbic narrative. Eco-declarations sprinkled especially thick after announcements of New European Bauhaus activities and its lucrative programs. I was pleased to see representatives of large construction documentation stores begin to make statements about planetary values. In time, the NEB finished its information campaign and slowed down to align with Brussels procedures leading to concrete. That's when most of the new concerned voices quieted down, as if the climate catastrophe was no more. Still, the nominations for the New European Bauhaus Prizes 2021 were widely reported over the summer. But the results themselves were no longer.
It is worth looking at the post-competition exhibition https://prizes.new-european-bauhaus.eu/winner-virtual-exhibition and favorably analyze the projects presented there. All Polish proposals lost in the competition, including the Łódź office and retail complex Monopolis (design: Grupa 5 Architekci) and Warsaw's Elektrownia Powiśle (design: APA Wojciechowski), both BREEAM-certified projects. Also losing out was the RiverView Estate in Gdansk (proj.: APA Wojciechowski), with a LEED Gold certificate. In the category in which the sites were entered - Revitalized Urban and Rural Spaces - Spain's La Fábrika in the rural area of Extremadura won. The former cement plant has been brought back to life since 2009 by a community of more than three thousand people. As the verdict reads:
The restoration of the building and surrounding grounds uses mostly donated and recycled materials, and currently runs five permanent programs.
These include an independent outdoor cinema, an eco-building workshop, soil regeneration through nurturing the Mediterranean forest, a platform for artists and an education center. "Everything is united by a common goal: free culture and the revitalization of the area through art and cooperation." Thirty thousand euros of the award will come in handy for this community, leading by example in revitalization, according to the meaning of the term and the title of the category.
The results of the NEB competition have not fueled an environmental discussion in Poland, nor have they hit the covers of newspapers. And why is the enthusiasm for this initiative cooling down? We have nothing more constructive in sight, although we are racing against time. It's about the buoyancy of the planet, but also about the crisis of the collective imagination. Every positive example is an important inspiration. Maybe indifference stems from the fact that it's hard to value and stuff award-winning processes into spreadsheet boxes, that it's hard to make a commodity out of them? #architeclamikroclimates
Malgorzata KUCIEWICZ, Simone DE IACOBIS
CENTRAL Project Group
