Venice Biennale: Dialogue in the Details
Venice, Italy
2012

We define the theme of this year’s Venice Biennale, Common Ground, in physical as well as in intellectual terms. Physically, the intense intersection of the “detail”—the convergence of ideas, materiality, tectonics, and construction—guided our vision of common ground through its inherently collaborative nature. An architect’s voice and vision remains intact as existential evidence of their ideas. We have framed each detail as a totem – an object carrying an abstract spirit of its own, an animistic character that echoes the personality and signature of an architect. By isolating details and presenting them at half scale, one starts to inhabit this menagerie of architectural ideas as one detail starts to speak to another; they echo each other’s history, precedents, and references.

The idea of “details” is a particular homage to Carlo Scarpa, the architect of Veneto, and also to Piranesi, both of whom used details as moments of manifesto and as a springboard for their fertile imaginations and for the spaces they created.

Over the years, we have had the opportunity to work next to, in reference to, and in addition to the works of architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Paul Rudolph, Marcel Breuer, Mies van der Rohe, and Philip Johnson. Five details represent each of these five Masters. Our intellectual response is represented in the five details that stand in parallel dialogue. These are silent exchanges with deceased Masters, yet conversations and speculations continue on, creating an intellectual continuity within the language of contemporary architecture.

Credits:

Design Team: Toshiko Mori, Britt Johnson, Tei Carpenter
Commissioner: David Chipperfield
Fabrication: Tietz + Baccon, Brian Cronin

Photographs © Iwan Baan, Michael Moran, Patricia Parinejad